As the few readers I have may know I
have long whined about being stuck on dial-up at 28K and the
unavailability of affordable options out here in the country,
recently I stepped up to the Rogers Rocket Hub. Far from ideal, it
does free up the phone line and give me up to 200K (must spring for
that $150 external antenna to try and improve that some time) even if
it does triple my basic Internet costs, there are however a few
wrinkles which despite weeks of research and several conversations
with Rogers representatives before committing to the two year
contract necessary to get the Hub at the reduced price of $150.
As some of you may know both Bell and
Rogers hub wireless plans have a threshold of 3GB, 5GB and 10GB which
if exceeded takes you the the next level, the cost being about $45
for 3GB (taxes and other costs included) and rising to abt $55 for
5GB and over $70 for up to 10GB (with a per MB charge beyond that).
For old folks like us that is hardly the 'affordable' Internet that
our government is touting that all Canadians should have but if we
are to move on from dial-up it is the best of a very limited choice.
As you may imagine it is our wish to
keep our usage as low as possible and monitor it to try and stay
below the thresholds. With that in mind I signed in the the Rogers
customer pages where I was told we could check our usage – well
yes you can, sort off! After checking said pages several times I
could not figure out how my usages was increasing in large jumps
after minimal or no use, so I call Rogers customer service (nice guys
who actually are in Canada by the way) and here is what I learned.
The wireless usage shown on your
customer page is up to 48 hours or more out of date!! Rogers will
tell you that said data is updated every 4 hours and that may be true
but the data posted is from several days before meaning that
the usage in the last couple of days is not reflected in those
numbers making it all but impossible to know when you are approaching
a point where your monthly charges are going to jump.
Now that little wrinkle is bad enough
but let us say that despite the lack of accurate information you want
to check your usage regularly, this of course will use up a little of
your basic usage but that should only be a few hundred K. Wrong!!
Simply accessing your usage on the Rogers site (going there directly
after a redirect to sign in) is around 2MB (plus the uplink data
which is counted in wireless usage) and if you enter via the usual
page after signing in around double that. Now to those with unlimited
high speed or some of the more generous plans may scoff and say two
meg is nothing, but given that my secure banking site takes less than
500K to sign in, view my account synopsis and get a detailed up to
date view of my payments and deposits I have to ask is this a
deliberate ploy to send our usage over the edge?
The funny thing is that said pages are
very simple in appearance, almost all text with a few logo links, no
high rez pictures, no marquee's scrolling across the page or stuff
like that. It just reinforces my belief that many IT professionals
simply have no conception of the limits some viewers are working
under, they have the latest and greatest, have T1 connections and it
does not even enter into their personal hard drive (the one above
their shoulders) that unnecessarily 'heavy' pages not only slow
things down for those on less than speedy connections but add to the
general congestion that is starting to emerge on the net and
penalizes those of us that must pay big bucks for bandwidth.
Nuf said..... Rant OFF.
2 comments:
Now here is a tip for you. Stay away from Rogers and Bell.
Hard to do when they are your only choice!!
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