Rogers reduces bandwidth caps on two of its plans

August 15th, 2010

It’s been about 6 months since Rogers ceased to be competitive as an internet provider. Based on their prices and speeds at the time, there was no reason for anyone to consider Rogers as their ISP. I expected them to do something about it much faster, but they seemed to be content to not offer a competitive product.

Their strangest product was Extreme, which had the same download speed as Express, and justified its $13 premium by doubling the upload speed to a mere 1 Mbps, and increasing the bandwidth cap to 95 GB. Extreme just didn’t seem to make any sense, and it left Rogers without a Tier V internet speed. The logical thing for them to do was to increase the speed to compete with Fibe 16.

So, half a year later, Rogers has finally increased the download speed of Extreme to 15 Mbps. At the same time, they reduced the bandwidth cap to 80 GB. Leaving the bandwidth cap at 95 GB would have been the one thing that made it more attractive than Fibe 16, but instead the products are now essentially identical.

At the same time, Rogers reduced the bandwidth cap of their Lite service by a whopping 40% to 15 GB. That’s still much more than competing Tier II products, but they needed that extra bandwidth to justify the higher price and much lower upload speed. Bell’s Essential Plus still uploads more than 3 times faster than Lite, and for less money. And believe it or not, I’ve been living with a 2 GB bandwidth cap, without exceeding it, for several months now.

Since moving to Quebec, I’ve been on Videotron’s Basic service. I don’t know if it’s because of the apartment building, or what the explanation is, but apparently Videotron isn’t able to properly throttle my internet speed, so I can upload at 1 Mbps while paying for the Basic service. After living with Rogers’ 512 Kbps service for years, it’s wonderful to finally have a decent upload speed. With a 2 GB bandwidth cap, I no longer download large files, but I haven’t had to make any major sacrifices yet.

So, Videotron is for real, and I’ve added them to the service chart for comparison.

Bell in Blue, Rogers in Red, Videotron in Dark Yellow

Tier Service Price Speed Cap
VII None
Ultimate $99.99+7.00 50 Mbps/2 Mbps 175 GB
Ultimate 50 $81.95 50 Mbps/1 Mbps 125 GB
VI Fibe 25 $67.95+6.95 25 Mbps/7 Mbps 75 GB
Extreme Plus $69.99+7.00 25 Mbps/1 Mbps 125 GB
Ultimate 30 $65.95 30 Mbps/1 Mbps 100 GB
V Fibe 16 $61.95+3.95 16 Mbps/1 Mbps 75 GB
Extreme $59.99+3.00 15 Mbps/1 Mbps 80 GB
Ultimate 15 $54.95 15 Mbps/1 Mbps 60 GB
IV Fibe 12 $51.95+3.95 12 Mbps/1 Mbps 50 GB
Express $46.99+3.00 10 Mbps/512 Kbps 60 GB
None
III Fibe 6 $41.95+3.95 6 Mbps/1 Mbps 25 GB
Performance $41.95+3.95 6 Mbps/1 Mbps 25 GB
None
High-Speed $42.95 7.5 Mbps/820 Kbps 30 GB
II Essential Plus $31.95+3.95 2 Mbps/800 Kbps 2 GB
Lite $35.99+3.00 3 Mbps/256 Kbps 15 GB
Basic $27.95 2.5 Mbps/400 Kbps 3 GB
I None
Ultra Lite $27.99+3.00 500 Kbps/256 Kbps 2 GB
None

The first thing you’ll notice is that Videotron doesn’t charge a modem rental, so the price they list is actually the price! This is so refreshingly, astonishingly honesty that I’m almost at a loss for words. Then my joy turns to anger: how dare Rogers and Bell not be this upfront about the cost of their services? It’s the same bullshit with their cell phone plans. Everyone should list the full price of their product upfront; it should be the law.

Starting at the bottom of the chart, you’ll see that Videotron doesn’t offer a “high-speed” internet option in Tier I, though they do offer dial-up. Rogers is the only ISP that thinks that 500 Kbps still qualifies as high-speed. It boggles the mind, doesn’t it?

Videotron’s Basic service costs the same as Rogers’ Ultra Lite service ($3 less since there’s no modem rental), despite being 5 times faster for upload, 50% faster for download, and a 50% higher bandwidth cap. Videotron’s Tier II service is cheaper than Rogers’ Tier I service! It otherwise fits nicely between Roger’s Lite and Bell’s Essential Plus in terms of download and upload speeds, though for considerably less money ($8 less than Bell and $8/$11 less than Rogers, depending on whether or not you own your modem).

Rogers still doesn’t have a Tier III service, which is baffling when you consider that this must be the core market segment. How can they not afford to have a product in the sweet spot for speed and price? As a shareholder, I really want to kick someone at Rogers in the ass.

Anyway, Videotron is king of Tier III, coming in 25% faster for downloads, 16% higher bandwidth cap, about 20% slower for uploads, but $3 cheaper per month. Bell’s faster upload speed could definitely be worth more to some people than a 25% faster download speed, but with the higher bandwidth cap and lower price, I’d still probably stick with Videotron. I don’t know if I’d notice the difference in upload speeds all that much, but the extra bandwidth and extra money in my bank account would be nice.

Videotron doesn’t have a Tier IV service, but the progression from 7.5 Mbps to 15 Mbps does seem logical. Frankly, Tier IV seems like a pretty useless tier. It just makes sense for each tier to double in speed. Where’s Videotron’s Tier III product was basically Tier 3.5, I can forgive this omission.

Videotron’s Ultimate 15 service is the first one to not show a clear advantage over Bell. While Ultimate 15 is the cheapest Tier V service, it also has the lowest bandwidth cap by 15 to 20 GB. If you can live with that, it’s $11 cheaper than Bell and $5/$8 cheaper than Rogers. I was living with a 60 GB cap under Rogers’ Express service, so I could live under Ultimate 15′s cap.

Ultimate 30, on the other hand, is a tough sell. On the one hand, it’s extremly cheap, coming in $9 cheaper than Bell and $4/$11 cheaper than Rogers. In fact, Ultimate 30 is only $1 more than Fibe 16, despite downloading twice as fast and having a 33% faster download speed. There is no reason for anyone to buy Fibe 16 if they Ultimate 30 is available to them. As a Tier VI competitor, though, the download speed is 20% faster than Rogers and Bell, but the bandwidth cap is 25 GB lower than Rogers’ Extreme Plus service. While the bandwidth cap is 25 GB higher than Fibe 25, Fibe 25′s upload speed is 7 times faster! To be sure, $75 per month is a lot higher than $66, but the upload speed is 7 times faster! I can’t help but drool at the thought of how much time I could save while uploading thousands of files totalling more than 2 GB to my website with Fibe 25. RGB Classic Games has about 2.5 GB worth of files. For comparison:

2.5 GB @ 512 Kbps = 11.4 hours
2.5 GB @ 1 Mbps = 5.7 hours
2.5 GB @ 7 Mbps = 49 minutes

So, as a webmaster uploading a website, the difference between Fibe 16 and any other product available in Canada (except for Rogers’s absurdly priced Ultimate plan) is the difference between tying up my internet connection all day and uploading in the background while I watch an episode of Firefly on DVD or Blu-Ray.

Moving on to Tier VII, Videotron is $18/$25 per month cheaper than a competing service that is so expensive that only a handful people could possibly subscribe to. Based on the price difference, I suspect that a small number of people actually subscribe to Ultimate 50, but should they? Rogers’ Ultimate service has double the upload speed and an extra 50 GB of bandwidth. Again, for myself, I would choose Fibe 25 over either of them, even it wasn’t $7 cheaper than Videotron and $32/$39 cheaper than Rogers, just for the 7 Mbps upload speed. It is absurd that a Tier VI product is 3.5 to 7 times faster than the two Tier VII products. For that kind of money, would you not expect the ultimate internet experience? Again, that 75 GB cap is scary, being 50 GB lower than Videotron and 100 GB lower than Rogers, but if you can live with that limit, no one should consider buying Ultimate or Ultimate 50.

LodgeNet

August 15th, 2010

I recently stayed at hotel during my family reunion, and they had one of those LodgeNet N64 controllers. I’ve seen them for a few years, but I’ve never bothered to play. This time I decided to investigate.

It costs $6.99 per hour to play, and you get your choice of 31 games that you can switch between at any time.

Mario Kart 64 Super Smash Bros. Mario Tennis
Super Mario 64 Mario Party 3 Paper Mario
Kirby 64 Excitebike 64 Hydro Thunder
Rush 2: Extreme Racing USA Pokemon Snap Mario Golf
Star Wars: Rogue Squadron Star Fox 64 Donkey Kong 64
Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Ready 2 Rumble Boxing 1080 Snowboarding
Mortal Kombat 4 Yoshi’s Story The New Tetris
Dr. Mario 64 Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask Rampage 2: Universal Tour
Wave Race 64 Virtual Pool 64 Gauntlet Legends
F-Zero X Midway’s Greatest Arcade Hits Pilotwings 64
Virtual Chess

If you were stuck playing only one game, this would definitely not be a good deal. Having the option to switch games makes it worth it, in my opinion. I mean, at $7 per hour, you wouldn’t want to play for hours, but a single session is pretty decent entertainment for only $7. I was able to get about 30 stars in Super Mario 64, or I could have beaten Star Fox 64 and had time left over to win a game of chess and play a few rounds of Midway’s Great Arcade Hits.

I was terrified of going past my hour and getting billed for another one, but the system lets you know when it’s time to pay for another hour. Unfortunately, the system does not save your progress, so you can’t beat a game like Super Mario 64 or one of the Zelda games unless you can beat them in one sitting.

Super Mario 64 looked about the same on LodgeNet as it does on a normal Nintendo 64, and the controller is basically identical to a normal N64 controller (analog joystick and all) so the experience is not inferior to the real N64 experience.

All things considered, I was pretty happy with my $7 expenditure, and this proves that the N64 has held up very well over the years. The jump from 2D to 3D was huge but, frankly, games haven’t come nearly as far in the 14 years since the N64 came out. After nearly a decade and a half, those games are still fun and don’t look ridiculously crude or ugly by any means. Certainly you can’t compare F-Zero X to F-Zero GX, but the gameplay and graphics are not so dated as to render N64 games unplayable.

If you stay at a hotel that has LodgeNet and have $7 to spend, I recommend a quick trip down memory lane.

Paralympics

April 2nd, 2010

All of the Olympic torchbearers received an emailed invitation to attend the Paralympic Torch Relay, which just happened to begin in my home town, the nation’s capital! We were encouraged to wear our torchbearer uniforms, and some people even brought their torch!

The opening of the Paralympic Torch Relay was an amazing experience that was attended by political leaders and celebrities. I got to chat with my “boss”, Stockwell Day, the president of the Treasury Board. The Prime Minister gave a speech, and the Leader of the Opposition was present, as was former Ontario premier and current MP Bob Rae. Comedian Rick Mercer was an honorary torchbearer, and he came over and mugged with the torchbearers when we got together for a group photo, and I got to shake his hand!

Anyway, here’s some of the group photos.

Much ado about fiber

February 22nd, 2010

If you’ve been watching the Olympics in Canada, you’ve probably noticed that Bell has changed the name of most of their internet services to Fibe. That’s Fibe as in fiber optic.

If you don’t know too much about broadband delivery, this probably sounds exciting. Alas, this is nothing special. Most of the telecommunications infrastructure in this country was already fiber optic, so don’t get excited. The reason why we haven’t all be using gigabit internet at home all this time is that a network connection is only as fast as its slowest point. The connection to your home, and within your home, is where things get slow. Cable companies have aggressively developed and adopted the DOCSIS standard to allow cable connections to support high speed internet, while telephone companies have used a standard called ADSL, or some variation on DSL.

Anyway, I won’t bore you with the acronyms and minutiae. The news is that Bell has renamed Performance to Fibe 6, Max 12 becomes Fibe 12, Max 16 becomes Fibe 16, and there’s a new speed called Fibe 25. I don’t know how much I like the name Fibe, but I really like the fact that the speed is in the name. That’s a little thing I like to call honesty, as opposed to the meaningless marketing names Bell and its competitors have used until recently.

So, here’s my revised Tier comparison. There’s a Tier VII now because I’ve decided that 16 Mbps doesn’t compete with 25. That means that Bell has a Tier V product and Rogers doesn’t.

Bell in Blue, Rogers in Red

Tier Service Price Speed Cap
VII None
Ultimate $99.99+7.00 50 Mbps/2 Mbps 175 GB
VI Fibe 25 $67.95+6.95 25 Mbps/7 Mbps 75 GB
Extreme Plus $69.99+7.00 25 Mbps/1 Mbps 125 GB
V Fibe 16 $61.95+3.95 16 Mbps/1 Mbps 75 GB
None
IV Fibe 12 $51.95+3.95 12 Mbps/1 Mbps 50 GB
Extreme $59.99+3.00 10 Mbps/1 Mbps 95 GB
Express $46.99+3.00 10 Mbps/512 Kbps 60 GB
III Fibe 6 $41.95+3.95 6 Mbps/1 Mbps 25 GB
Performance $41.95+3.95 6 Mbps/1 Mbps 25 GB
None
II Essential Plus $31.95+3.95 2 Mbps/800 Kbps 2 GB
Lite $35.99+3.00 3 Mbps/256 Kbps 25 GB
I None
Ultra Lite $25.99+3.00 500 Kbps/256 Kbps 2 GB

Oh, did I say that Fibe 6 replaces Performance? Bell is still keeping a product called Performance, even though it’s identical to Fibe 6. I don’t know why.

Anyway, did you notice anything else about the change? All prices went up $2! But they only just raised their prices a few months ago! Also notice that the modem rental on Fibe 25 is a whopping $6.95 per month, like the DOCSIS 3.0 modem/router from Rogers. Bell’s prices are still better than Rogers, but the price gap is closing. It’s strange that it’s Bell that’s closing it rather than Rogers.

Despite the price increases, Bell still beats Rogers on speed and price in every tier. The only place Rogers is still winning is their bandwidth cap.

Bell doesn’t have anything that competes with Rogers Ultimate service at 50 Mbps, but how large can the market for $100 per month internet be anyway? But where Rogers only recently became the first major ISP in Canada to offer a 2 Mbps upload service — which is only available on their absurdly expensive 50 Mbps download service — Bell has just blown them out of the water by offering a 7 Mbps upload speed on their 25 Mbps download service! This might not mean much if it was another $100/month service that no one is ever going to buy, but Fibe 25 is only $6 more per month than Fibe 16. If you’re a webmaster and do as much uploading as I do, there’s no reason not to buy Fibe 25 if you were considering Fibe 16. The only problem is that scary 75 GB bandwidth cap. Rogers 25/1 service has an extra 50 GB per month.

In conclusion, I’m super excited about Canada’s first 7 Mbps upload service. As I concluded before, there’s absolutely no reason to buy internet access from Rogers any more, now that Bell is faster and cheaper in every tier. As a Rogers shareholder, I’m getting a bit fed up that Rogers is making no effort to be competitive. In fact, I’m pretty sure that they’re legally obliged to be competitive to protect their shareholders’ interests. What are they thinking?

I don’t know what to say, folks. I’ve held out all this time, but it’s never been more tempting to switch to Bell. Switching from Express to Fibe 25 would cost an extra $24.91 per month, but my download speed would increase 2.5x, and my upload speed would increase 14x! With the discount for the first 12 months and the bundle discount, this might just be the product that will convince consumers that $75 per month for internet access is reasonable.

Chrome still needs some work

February 21st, 2010

When I started using the internet, Netscape Navigator was king. Internet Explorer 3.0 was a great browser, and by IE 4.0 it was clearly the better browser. That was when I left Netscape.

For years, I used IE exclusively, until I started hearing about Firefox. I was a bit skeptical that an open source browser could beat a Microsoft product, and I’m wary of betas, so I didn’t try it until 1.0 came out. I downloaded Firefox 1.0 the first day it came out, and I haven’t been an IE user since. It was like night and day.

IE 6 was old, so it wasn’t that surprising that Firefox was faster. But far more than that, Firefox changed the way people browsed the internet. When I tried tabbed browsing for the first time, I could never go back. No more opening multiple windows for me. Firefox was faster, had a cleaner interface, was more standards compliant, and had tabbed browsing. It was no contest. I can’t remember a v1.0 of any product being superior to a product as mature as Internet Explorer, so I was quite impressed.

I’ve been more than loyal to Firefox, I’ve been an evangelist. I used to promote the use of Firefox. I was active in converting my friends and co-workers. It was about more than the fact that Firefox was a better browser; it was about the fact that it was open source, a concept I enthusiastically support. So, as Opera, Safari and Chrome have made waves, I stuck with Firefox. Sure, I gave Opera a try one time, but I didn’t like it and couldn’t be bothered to acquire a taste for it. I was a Firefox fanatic through and through.

I don’t know how many people were aware of it, but there was a race to pass the Acid3 test. When Safari and Chrome were pushing 100%, Firefox was in the low 90s, and Internet Explorer 7 was at 14%. Firefox 3.6 hits 94%, and IE 8 improved to 20%. Seriously, 20%?

More and benchmarks have been coming out, testing things like JavaScript rendering speed — which is the new arms race in the browser world — and memory usage. Chrome and Safari have been consistently beating Firefox in JavaScript rendering speed, and both of them pass Acid3. Internet Explorer, the most popular browser in the world, continues to come in dead last in every benchmark. It’s kind of sad, really.

Anyway, I finally gave in and tried out Chrome 3.0, and… I’ve switched to Chrome. I have trouble using Firefox now. Firefox wastes too much space on the navigation menu and buttons and stuff, whereas Chrome devotes almost the entire screen to the web page. Chrome feels faster, looks better, and takes up less screen real estate. It wasn’t a hard choice, really.

Nevertheless, I have some serious complaints about Chrome, and I’m going to air them now, because they ought to be easy enough to fix. Once fixed, Chrome will be the obvious browser of choice.

1. Chrome crashes. A lot.

Like, almost every time I use it. I’ll type in a web address and get,  ”Whoa! Google Chrome has crashed”. It’s a daily occurrence, and very surprising.

For the record, this never happened when I briefly used Chrome before switching from Windows XP Professional SP3. Now I’m using Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit, and a lot of my software isn’t working very well any more, including DOSBox of all things, so maybe Chrome doesn’t like 64-bit operating systems yet. Still, that’s no excuse since we’re all going to be using one soon. In 12 years of surfing, I’ve never had a browser crash as often as Chrome. Fortunately, it remembers what pages I was on and brings them back up when it reloads.

2. No multi-tab closure warning.

Sometimes when I’m done with a page, I accidentally hit close on the whole browser instead of the tab that I’m done with. Whenever you try to close the browser while multiple tabs are open in Internet Explorer or Firefox, the browser checks to make sure that you really want to close all of your open tabs, like this.

Chrome, on the other hand, just shuts down, taking half a dozen pages worth of research with it. Why the hell doesn’t it warn you when you’re closing multiple tabs?

3. No built-in RSS reader.

Seriously? I mean, I could understand if they were still on version 1 or 2 and hadn’t gotten around to it yet, but this is version 4 for crying out loud! No RSS reader? Even Internet Explorer has an RSS reader!

4. Full-screen browsing.

I mentioned previously that I don’t like my browser taking a lot of space away from the pages that I’m viewing. Since Firefox was pretty bad for that, I got into the habit of putting my browser in full-screen mode. Full-screen mode in Firefox is great. If I want to type in a new URL, I put my mouse cursor at the top of the screen and the awesome bar drops down. No need to leave full-screen mode to go to a new website. Not so with Chrome! Once you’re in full-screen mode, the address bar is gone! When I put my mouse at the top of the screen, an overlay drops down reminding me that I can press F11 to leave full-screen mode, or you can just click on the link in the overlay. Well, why doesn’t the overlay have an address bar in it? I shouldn’t have to leave full-screen mode to go to a different website. Very annoying.

5. No awesome bar.

I was skeptical when I first heard about the awesome bar, but it’s so awesome that it almost prevented me from leaving Firefox. In Firefox, you can type any part of an address into the awesome bar and Firefox will figure out what site you want to go to within a few keystrokes. If I want to go to my blog, for instance, I start typing the word “blog” and Firefox suggests www.classicdosgames.com/blog/.

Chrome, on the other hand, will only search for addresses that begin with whatever you’re typing. Typing “blog” will do absolutely nothing. I have to start typing “www.classicdosgames.com”, but a dozen other pages from the site that I visit more frequently will come up first. I have to get all the way to www.classicdosgames.com/b before it will suggest my blog. Very annoying. The awesome bar is, in fact, so awesome that I would immediately return to Firefox if they could make it look as nice as Chrome. You know, tabs across the top and stuff. The awesome bar is simply the fastest way to go to any website that you visit frequently, and you can find any website you’ve previously visited if you remember any part of the address. I often forget the domain name of a site that I don’t visit frequently, and Chrome is no help at all in that situation. Firefox will find it every time.

6. Lack of recognition

This one isn’t Chrome’s fault. A lot of websites don’t recognize Chrome yet, so sometimes I get an error message like this.

An older browser? My version of Chrome is 11 days old! Some websites suggest that I might want to upgrade to Internet Explorer 6 or Firefox 2. Some websites won’t let me proceed unless I switch to another browser. Now, maybe I’m being too logical here, but if someone is visiting with a browser that you don’t recognize, wouldn’t that mean that the browser is too new? Since a new browser is likely to be at least as standards compliant as any of the current browsers, websites should assume that an unrecognized browser is fully capable of running whatever content they have. Anyone who knows anything about the technology industry should know that any product too new to be on your list of supported browsers is going to be a supported browser. Chrome isn’t even a new browser any more, and yet a number of websites still give me this crap.

So, there’s my wish list. Chrome is the fastest, cleanest, most standards compliant browser in the world. I just want these five little things fixed and it would be perfect. Get back to me on that, Google.

Carrying the Olympic torch

January 3rd, 2010

I got to carry the Olympic torch on December 12 as part of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic relay!

The camera adds 30 pounds in these pictures. I was afraid that I was going to be standing outside for hours and freezing, so I wore many, many layers of clothing. As it turned out, I was only outside for a few minutes, so I didn’t need most of them.

Why Britain’s DPI plans will hurt everyone

January 3rd, 2010

A commenter from my previous entry mentioned that Quebec cable provider Videotron doesn’t use Deep Packet Inspection, while Bell, Rogers and Telus do. It’s time to talk about what DPI is and why it matters.

I talked about throttling and Net Neutrality in a previous entry. The source of the debate is that ISPs are inspecting the packets (the discrete bursts of data that get sent over networks like the internet) to see what kind of data is being transmitted. If they see that the packets are from BitTorrent, they slow your internet access. BitTorrent can be used to stream both legal and illegal content, but concerns about copyright infringement have nothing to do with it.

When you download a file from a website, your download speed will be limited to their upload speed. Even if it’s from Microsoft, you’ll probably get stuck at around 10 Mbps, even if you have a 50 Mbps connection. BitTorrent, on the other hand, breaks a file into blocks and allows you to download the file from dozens of people at the same time, increasing the odds that you’ll be able to download at the maximum speed that you’re paying for. It also allows you to share files with dozens of people at a time, increasing the odds that you’ll be able to upload at the maximum speed that you’re paying for.

The key words here are “paying for”. ISPs lure customers with promises of super fast download speeds that they won’t normally have to deliver, through no fault of their own, because you can only download as fast as the other person can upload. But if everyone were using BitTorrent, then the ISPs would actually have to deliver the speeds that you’re paying for, and they can’t handle that much bandwidth! Like an overbooked flight, ISPs have sold more bandwidth than they can actually deliver. If too many people use all of the bandwidth that they paid for at any given time, the ISPs won’t be able to handle all of the traffic, and they’ll have to buy more routing and switching equipment. That added expense would reduce profit margins from ridiculous to slightly less ridiculous, so you can understand why this would be bad.

Throttling is really the only concern I have about DPI at the moment, and I’m still hoping that the CRTC will ban the practice in Canada. You have every right to get the speeds that you paid for, and ISPs can’t arbitrarily decide what you can and can’t do with your internet connection.

DPI is about to be used for far more troubling purposes in the United Kingdom, however. The UK has put forth legislation to force ISPs to use Deep Packet Inspection to search for copyright infringement so that they can kick people off of the internet after three strikes. Obviously I have serious concerns about legislators in Canada deciding to use DPI the same way here.

This is a privacy issue, and when it comes to privacy, there are usually two camps: those who say that if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to worry about, and those who say that the government/your ISP shouldn’t be snooping on you, period. Here’s how I feel about it. Read the rest of this entry »

Rogers reduces prices of their fastest internet services

December 24th, 2009

Rogers has reduced the price on its absurdly expensive 25 and 50 Mbps internet services to more reasonable levels, which is nice. Extreme Plus (25 down/1 up) dropped $26 to $69.99, and Ultimate (50 down/2 up) dropped a whopping $50 per month to $99.99 per month.

I’m not sure how new this is, but Rogers apparently charges a one-time fee of $14.95 when you initially get their internet service, which is a surprising disincentive to switch. A fee to deter new subscribers? What were they thinking?

It turns out that you don’t actually have to purchase the DOCSIS 3.0 modem-router to get Extreme Plus and Ultimate, though the rental is a surprising $7 per month, versus $3 per month for the DOCSIS 2.0 modem used in the lower tiers. The purchase price of the 3.0 modem-router is $199.95, versus $99.95 for the DOCSIS 2.0 modem.

Anyway, here is the updated pricing for Rogers vs. Bell. Remember that the modem rental can be eliminated from Rogers pricing by purchasing the modem, where as a “rental fee” always applies to Bell because their modems cannot be purchased.

Bell in Blue, Rogers in Red

Tier Service Price Speed Cap
VI None
Ultimate $99.99+7.00 50 Mbps/2 Mbps 175 GB
V None
Extreme Plus $69.99+7.00 25 Mbps/1 Mbps 125 GB
IV Max 16 $59.95+3.95 16 Mbps/1 Mbps 75 GB
Extreme $59.99+3.00 10 Mbps/1 Mbps 95 GB
III Max 12 $49.95+3.95 12 Mbps/1 Mbps 50 GB
Express $46.99+3.00 10 Mbps/512 Kbps 60 GB
II Performance $39.95+3.95 6 Mbps/1 Mbps 25 GB
Lite $35.99+3.00 3 Mbps/256 Kbps 25 GB
I Essential Plus $29.95+3.95 2 Mbps/800 Kbps 2 GB
Ultra Lite $25.99+3.00 500 Kbps/256 Kbps 2 GB

In this version, Bell is faster than Rogers in every tier in which they compete, sometimes by as much as four times! I see now that there’s no point in basing tiers on price, because there’s no point in comparing these ridiculously mismatched speeds; Rogers simply doesn’t compete with Bell on price any more. Now I see that it should really be based on speed.

Bell in Blue, Rogers in Red

Tier Service Price Speed Cap
VI None
Ultimate $99.99+7.00 50 Mbps/2 Mbps 175 GB
V Max 16 $59.95+3.95 16 Mbps/1 Mbps 75 GB
Extreme Plus $69.99+7.00 25 Mbps/1 Mbps 125 GB
IV Max 12 $49.95+3.95 12 Mbps/1 Mbps 50 GB
Extreme $59.99+3.00 10 Mbps/1 Mbps 95 GB
Express $46.99+3.00 10 Mbps/512 Kbps 60 GB
III Performance $39.95+3.95 6 Mbps/1 Mbps 25 GB
None
II Essential Plus $29.95+3.95 2 Mbps/800 Kbps 2 GB
Lite $35.99+3.00 3 Mbps/256 Kbps 25 GB
I None
Ultra Lite $25.99+3.00 500 Kbps/256 Kbps 2 GB

This model just makes more sense. It’s debatable whether Bell’s 16 Mbps service is close enough in speed to compete with Rogers’ 25 Mbps service, but there is no question that Hi-Speed Lite is not in the same tier as Bell’s Performance. It’s a 100% difference in speed! Performance is twice as fast for $4 less. You can’t compare Rogers 3 Mbps service to Bell’s 6 Mbps service. Lite competes with Bell’s 2 Mbps service. I can’t make it any clearer than this: Rogers does not have a Tier III internet service.

Likewise, Ultra Lite is not in the same tier as Essential Plus. Essential Plus may be $4 more, but it’s also four times faster! Rogers is now the only provider that still has a Tier I product. There’s really no reason for any “high speed” internet service to be measured in kilobits per second any more. I was going to rename it Tier 0, but it’s still ten times faster than dial-up, which is reason enough for it to exist. Still, Essential Plus has got to look pretty tempting when it’s four times faster at downloading, three times faster at uploading, and only an extra $4 per month.

As for me, I’m still in Tier IV with Express. Bell wins this tier, too. Rogers, for some reason, has two Tier IV services, and the only difference is that they’ll double your upload speed for an extra $13 per month. There’s no reason to do that, of course, because Max 12 has the same upload speed, and is also faster and cheaper than Extreme. I don’t know why any new customer would go with Rogers for a Tier IV internet service, when Bell is faster than Extreme for $10 less, and also 20% faster at downloading and 100% faster at uploading than Express for only $3 more. So why am I still with Rogers? I’m severely tempted to switch. That means a lot coming from a Rogers shareholder and former employee. Rogers simply isn’t competing with Bell any more. But why not, I wonder?

So, let’s say that I’m switching. Am I going to Max 12 for only $3 more? Actually, as I’ve said in the past, I was happy with my download speed when it was only 7 Mbps. As a webmaster, I spend a lot of time uploading content, so what I really care about is getting a 1 Mbps upload speed. I could get that with Performance for less than I’m paying now. 6/1 is plenty fast, and it would be a no-brainer except that I’m a bit wary of that 25 GB cap. I rarely download more than 20 GB in a month, but I had 59 GB one time, so I might break my cap once or twice a year. Bandwidth cap is the only area where Rogers still beats Bell. But is that enough?

Wake up, Rogers!

The Day Apple Became Cool

December 20th, 2009

Apple has made some excellent business decisions over the last few years. Just as Napster was taken down by the courts, Apple provided a legal alternative with iTunes, revolutionizing the way people buy music. The iPod helped bring about the MP3 player revolution and rendered the Compact Disc obsolete. Switching to Intel processors made it possible to dual boot between the Mac OS and Windows, making it possible to finally have it all: a computer that’s a PC and a Mac. Yes, Apple has had some great ideas over the past few years, but lots of great ideas have failed to catch on. A huge part of Apple’s success is that they finally came up with a competent marketing campaign.

In the past, Apple did a great job of conquering the market for graphic professionals but, for most of my life, the only people I knew who owned Macs were my teachers at high school. Apple appealed to the intelligentsia with campaigns like “Think Different”, which suggested that the revolutionary thinkers of the 20th Century would use Macs.

I remember seeing posters featuring Gandhi and Einstein in my high school. I can say with absolute assurance that Gandhi would never have used a Mac. Gandhi treasured Indian traditions and famously made his own clothes with a spinning wheel (which is visible in the left side of the picture). He used technology as little as possible. Now, I know, Apple wasn’t actually saying that Gandhi would have been a Mac user, only that he was a person who thought differently. Still, I found it offensive to use Gandhi’s image to promote their products.

I might be alone in being offended by the inclusion of Gandhi in the campaign, but Gandhi is a personal hero of mine. There was a lot of potential for backlash from this campaign, if you think about it. Jim Henson was a beloved children’s entertainer who died too young. Amelia Earhart died during her attempt to think differently, and Martin Luther King and Gandhi were assassinated for thinking differently. Did no one think that maybe it was in poor taste to use people who were murdered in their ads? Why didn’t they include JFK, or did they realize that that one might cause too much outrage?

At any rate, these ads never stood a chance of appealing to young people. They’re too high brow, too obscure, and too out of touch with my generation. This kind of marketing is exactly why the only people using Macs were hippies and teachers.

Then, one day, I saw this ad on television.

Walkie Talkie Man was a great choice for the song. Between 0:17 and 0:21, when multiple copies of the dancing girl spin around her while she does the helicopter hair thing, I was thinking, “This is the best ad ever!” For the first time ever, Apple was cool.

Apple is finally marketing to regular people, and it turns out the 99% of the world that they had ignored for decades had quite a lot of money. It seems obvious, but Apple has finally figured out that it isn’t good enough to just be different and market your products to people who think differently. You have to make products that appeal to everyone and market them to everyone. Duh!

Bell Internet gets cheaper… and slower?

September 13th, 2009

Rogers recently introduced 25 and 50 Mbps internet services in the Toronto area, with plans to expand into other markets in the future. I wondered how Bell would respond, or if they would feel the need to respond at all, given that nothing has changed for most Rogers customers. Well, they did respond. Rogers has always had the ability to offer faster speeds than Bell can because Rogers uses cable and Bell is stuck with DSL. Increasing speeds isn’t an option, unless you have to live next door to the CO, so their only option was to reduce prices, which is exactly what they’ve done. Bell has reduced their number of residential internet service tiers from five to four, eliminating the Internet Essential service from the bottom.

For review’s sake, here is the old Bell service structure:

Old service rates

Service Price Speed Cap Overage cost
Max 16 $87.95+3.95 16 Mbps/1 Mbps 100 GB $1.50/GB
Max 10 $57.95+3.95 10 Mbps/1 Mbps 100 GB $1.50/GB
Performance $47.95+3.95 7 Mbps/1 Mbps 60 GB $1.50/GB
Essential Plus $37.95+3.95 2 Mbps/800 Kbps 20 GB $2.50/GB
Essential $27.95+3.95 500 Kbps/500 Kbps 2 GB $2.50/GB

So, on to what’s changed.

Since the names of the services remain the same, at first glance it looks like all of their services have dropped in price to the speed grade below, other than a $2 increase. For example, Performance used to cost $47.95 and Essential cost $37.95, and now Performance costs $39.95. Reducing cost is definitely good! While they were at it, Max 10 became Max 12, getting 2 Mbps faster, which is also good!

What caught my eye first, though, was the apparent decrease in speed of Performance from 7 Mbps to 6 Mbps, and the fact the bandwidth caps have been decreased in every service tier, by as much as 90% for Essential Plus! Essential Plus retains the same speed that it did before (2 Mbps/800 Kbps) but inherited the bandwidth cap of Essential, dropping from 20 GB per month to 2 GB per month!

Here’s the new service chart:

Service Price Download Upload Cap Overage cost
Max 16 $59.95+3.95 (-$28) 16 Mbps 1 Mbps 75 GB (-25) $1.00/GB (-$0.50)
Max 12 $49.95+3.95 (-$8) 12 Mbps (+2) 1 Mbps 50 GB (-50) $1.50/GB
Performance $39.95+3.95 (-$8) 6 Mbps (-1) 1 Mbps 25 GB (-35) $2.00/GB (+$0.50)
Essential Plus $29.95+3.95 (-$8) 2 Mbps 800 Kbps 2 GB (-18) $2.50/GB

Then I realized that you can spin the change in the opposite direction to see what has really happened.

Every service tier has increased in speed to the next higher tier and increased in price by $2 per month. Essential used to be $27.95 per month, it was a 500 Kbps/500 Kbps service with a 2 GB cap, and now it’s $29.95 per month, but it’s a 2 Mbps/1 Mbps service. From that perspective, Essential has been renamed Essential Plus and the cap has remained the same. Essential Plus has been renamed Performance, Performance has been renamed Max 12, Max 10 has been renamed Max 16, and it’s Max 16 that has been eliminated… at least pricewise. This second chart illustrates what has really happened.

Service Price Download Upload Cap Overage cost
Max 16 $59.95+3.95 (+$2) 16 Mbps (+6) 1 Mbps 75 GB (-25) $1.00/GB (-$0.50)
Max 12 $49.95+3.95 (+$2) 12 Mbps (+5) 1 Mbps 50 GB (-10) $1.50/GB
Performance $39.95+3.95 (+$2) 6 Mbps (+4) 1 Mbps (+0.2) 25 GB (+5) $2.00/GB (-$0.50)
Essential Plus $29.95+3.95 (+$2) 2 Mbps (+1.5) 800 Kbps (+300) 2 GB $2.50/GB

So every tier has gotten the speed of the next higher tier for only $2 more per month, which is wonderful news. And if you used to have Max 16, your price has just dropped $28 per month! But there’s still the little matter of the bandwidth cap, which has dropped dramatically for the top two tiers. Max 12 has dropped from 60 GB per month to 50, and Max 16 has dropped from 100 GB to 75. Where once there were two services that offered 100 GB caps and one that offered 60, now there is one that offers 75 and one that offers 50.

If you used to have one of the slower services, you’ve gained a lot of speed, and an extra 5 GB per month if you used to be on Essential Plus. If you used to have Max 10, you’re essentially getting the speed of Max 16, but you’ve gone from 100 GB per month to 50, and if you used to have Max 16, then you still do, but the price has gone down $28 per month and your bandwidth cap has dropped from 100 GB to 75.

For the few people who were on Max 16, the decrease in price probably outweighs the decrease in cap size since, if you really need 100 GB per month, you can just exceed the cap and the maximum overage is $30 per month, so the cost hasn’t really changed if you use more than 75 GB per month, but it has dropped dramatically if you use less than 75 GB per month. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the largest cap that Bell offers is only 75 GB per month now. The fact that the highest price has dropped to $59.95 is a VERY good thing, and that’s exactly the way it should be until Bell starts offers a 25 and 50 Mbps service of their own. Still, the decrease in bandwidth cap is worrying, and is no doubt a trend that Bell would like to continue.

Reducing the number of tiers to four is something I consider praiseworthy, and I like the fact that Bell no longer has a service that is slower than 2 Mbps. The speed increments also make sense, smoothly increase from 2 to 6 to 12 to 16 Mbps. On speed and price, Bell is heading in the right direction. They got it wrong on the bandwidth caps, though. Max 12 should have a 60 GB cap (less than the old Max 10, but the same as the old Performance which the new Max 12 replaces at the same price), and Max 16 should still have a 100 GB cap.

As I see it, there are now six price tiers of internet service available to Bell and Rogers customers, and Bell has no answer to Rogers’ two fastest tiers. In the four tiers in which they do compete, though, their services are generally slightly more expensive, but MUCH faster. Here’s a comparison of Rogers and Bell. I removed the cost for exceeding the bandwidth cap for simplicity’s sake, and since there wasn’t much difference.

Bell in Blue, Rogers in Red

Tier Service Price Speed Cap
VI None
Ultimate $149.99 50 Mbps/2 Mbps 175 GB
V None
Extreme Plus $95.95+3.00 25 Mbps/1 Mbps 125 GB
IV Max 16 $59.95+3.95 16 Mbps/1 Mbps 75 GB
Extreme $59.99+3.00 10 Mbps/1 Mbps 95 GB
III Max 12 $49.95+3.95 12 Mbps/1 Mbps 50 GB
Express $46.99+3.00 10 Mbps/512 Kbps 60 GB
II Performance $39.95+3.95 (+$2) 6 Mbps/1 Mbps 25 GB
Lite $35.99+3.00 3 Mbps/256 Kbps 25 GB
I Essential Plus $29.95+3.95 2 Mbps/800 Kbps 2 GB
Ultra Lite $25.99+3.00 500 Kbps/256 Kbps 2 GB

As you can see, it isn’t pretty for Rogers. In Tier I, Bell is 4x faster downstream and 3x faster upstream. In Tier II, Bell is 2x faster down and 4x faster up. In Tier III, Bell is 20% faster down and 2x faster up. In Tier IV, Bell is 60% faster downstream. Rogers has a monopoly on Tier V and VI, but who really pays $100 to $150 per month for internet service? Even if those tiers were available in my area — which they aren’t, despite being the second largest city in the Rogers service area and the nation’s capital — I wouldn’t upgrade my internet service unless I won the lottery.

Rogers should consider doing the same thing that Bell just did, and push everybody up one speed grade at the same price. Rogers’ 3 Mbps service should compete with Bell’s 2 Mbps; Rogers’ 10 should compete with Bell’s 6; Rogers’ other 10 should compete with Bell’s 12; and Rogers’ 25 should compete with Bell’s 16. And while you’re at it, how about making a difference between Express and Extreme other than the upload speed?!

I’m sure that Rogers is going to do just that, but the part that worries me is that Rogers still has higher bandwidth caps in each tier. The Bell cap reductions will give Rogers and excuse to reduce the cap on their $46.99 service from 60 GB to 50, and on their $59.99 service from 95 GB to 75 GB… or less. Bell has justified reducing their bandwidth caps by giving everyone a speed boost for $2, so Rogers will probably do the same. Whereas it seems intuitive that bandwidth caps will slowly increase as the cost of bandwidth decreases for ISPs, it looks like the trend in Canada is that bandwidth caps are going to slowly decrease! The big question is, how low will they go?