February 4, 2009

Is Rogers’ Monthly Usage Allowance Enough Bandwidth?

Three years ago I wrote about Rogers’ bandwidth limit of 60 GB per month and people are still angry and commenting about it.

Rogers refers to bandwidth limits as the nicer sounding usage allowance. But is 60 GB per month enough? It’s 2009 and people are using more bandwidth than ever before.

Usage Allowance is Good

Usage allowance is good for Rogers. Their website makes it sound like imposing bandwidth limits is a good thing for their customers:

To continue to meet your needs for speed, reliability and continuous improvements to the network, each of our service options now includes a usage allowance.

Rogers

Imposing monthly usage allowances on Internet services lets Rogers charge their customers more money in the form of expensive plans (95 GB per month for $54.95) or usage penalties — if you use more bandwidth than your service plan allows you are billed for the additional bandwidth.

You Don’t Really Need More Than 60 GB Do You?

According to Rogers’ website, with a 60 GB allowance you can:

  • download 15 movies
  • play online games for 2,000 hours (83 days)
  • download 15,400 songs

If 60 GB of bandwidth isn’t enough you can upgrade to a 95 GB allowance plan that allows you to:

  • download 24 movies
  • play online games for 3,000 hours (133 days)
  • download 24,300 songs

It seems like 60 GB would be enough for most people according to Rogers’ research but a quick glance at the comments from my earlier entry indicates that 60 GB isn’t enough bandwidth for a lot of people.

I’ve never gone over my 60 GB limit and I would describe myself as a moderate to heavy web user. I use my home Internet service for my business and I’m online all day long. There are 3 other people in my house that are online at various times and I still haven’t hit the 60 GB limit. Maybe my situation is unique. For all I know I fit the profile of the average Internet user.

If you were to put a limit on your bandwidth, what would it be? Do you use more than 60 GB per month on a regular basis?

Posted in Technology and Web at 4:34 PM