Thursday, September 23, 2010

Netflix and the Roger's Bandwidth Cap

Rogers doesn't have a "Cap" - rather a "threshold", over which you will pay for your extra useage up to a maximum of $50 per billing period.

Contrary to the CBC news reports that claimed that Rogers lowered their "caps" earlier this year when Netflix got approval for providing service in Canada, what they actually did was to raise the "Extra Usage" charge from a maximum of $25 to $50 per billing period.
So the real cost of Netflix in Canada, if you are near or above your alloted bandwidth is not $7.99 per month as Netflix say on their website but rather up to $57.99 per month (not such a bargain as the bill of fair is much more restrictive than what is available in the US and on P2P file-sharing sites).

For those that are on an "Extreme" plan you are currently paying for 95G per monthly billing period, so if you use the Netflix service heavily (they say on their website that you can expect 1G per hour for normal DVD quality and 2G per hour for HD) you will be paying this extra rate if you go above 95 (or 47 and a half) hours per month.

Of course if you are well about this $50 threshold maximum it makes sense to use more bandwidth rather than less - this kinda makes a nonsense of the concept of a "Cap"????

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

rogers lowered caps netflix

Brampton said...

netflix bandwidth caps

Anonymous said...

"caps", "threshold", whatever.

Semantics.

So the Netflix offer of $7.99 per month to watch whatever, whenever, is totally bogus.

False advertising. No matter what someone chooses to call it.

The point is Rogers hammers you with higher rates than you signed up for.

Netflix should point this out in their ads.