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.