I was thrilled to see Rogers rolling out a new 50Mb/s Internet service tier based on DOCSIS 3.0 this morning. At $150/mo, it is a bit pricey, especially when you realize there is a 150GB/mo bandwidth cap. It is usually wise to tack on another $25/mo to account for unlimited overage. This works out to $175/mo for the fastest consumer Internet in Canada with unlimited bandwidth. This is a far cry from Bell, who will be charging small ISP’s and their own customers $0.75/GB over 300/mo. This means that someone who uses for example 1TB in a month, would get charged in the neighborhood of $6-700/mo. A very expensive proposition! And the maximum speed from Bell is only 16Mb/s, a quarter of Rogers’ new service.
I believe that the price difference between Rogers and Bell are indicative of their philosophies on broadband. Rogers obviously believes that affordable high-speed is the way of the future. Rolling out 50Mb/s wired broadband and a 21Mb/s 3G network for mobile devices in the same month is interesting to say the least. I would suspect that they are planning to launch some sort of multimedia over Internet service in the next few months. Obviously they are not suffering from the terrible infrastructure Bell convinced the CRTC of. I think Bell is trying to stall the inevitable move of multimedia and telephony services to the Internet, worried that it will break their monopoly and major revenue streams. Rogers on the other hand, realizes that VoIP and multimedia over Internet is the way of the future, and is preparing to be the new leader in Internet services.
I’m also curious as to whether Apple is preparing some exciting new product that requires fast Internet. Since Rogers began selling the Apple iPhone, more and more they appear to be buddying up to each other. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple has managed to convince Rogers that the iTunes TV/movie store is a viable avenue for these new IP based multimedia services.
It seems Bell’s decision to rape consumers with bandwidth charges is convincing many to leave both them and their resellers. A quick peek at the DSLreports forums will confirm this. I sense that Bell has made a series of mistakes over the last two years, and are soon going to lose their monopoly over the Canadian telephone/DSL market. If they do not act soon, not only will they have lost these markets, but they will lose out in the TV market as well. I sincerely hope Bell realizes their stupidity and begin making changes for the better.
Let’s not forget that Rogers has bandwidth caps on it’s wholesale as well, which you seem pretty ignorant about in this post, where as Bell has not (yet) successfully managed to achieve the same. Rogers and Bell are pretty much as bad as each other, with Rogers only being slightly better in that they are actually building up their network. However the caps are obviously overpriced on both sides.