For This One Little Thing, Rogers Is An Asshole

First off: I'm kind of a fan of Rogers. I've had various dealings with them over the years and they've always been helpful and whatever. Sure it's a bit more expensive, but their shit is reliable and I'm ok spending what I spend with them.

But I have serious beef with their ridiculous mobile data plan schemes. Like SERIOUS beef. Enough beef to write the very thing you're reading right now.  That's a lot of beef.

Their scheme is this: if you pay for 1GB of data a month and go over your limit, they temporarily upgrade you (for that month only) to the next tier of plan, which has a 2GB limit and costs $15 more a month.

So what happens is, no matter how much you go over, they charge you $15. 1MB too much? $15. 1000MB too many? $15. I recently noticed "Oh shit I'm getting close to my limit, better be careful" and tried really hard to stay under my limit. I failed, to the tune of 5.64MB. That's 3 or 4 photos worth of data. One mp3. $15. For the mathematically challenged, that's 0.6% of the total amount of gigabytes I'm being charged for.


Why am I pissed? Because there's no good reason for Rogers to do this besides "...because we want to".

Rogers has clearly demonstrated that they have the ability to count every single MB of data that I use. I get a text message the minute I hit 75% of my cap, and another the minute I go over, this one telling me "Hey, why don't you upgrade your data plan?". Do they just somehow lose the ability to count individual MB between 1 and 2 GB? Of course fucking not, because if I had the 2GB plan they'd sure as shit count every single MB hoping I go over and they can charge me for 3GB.

Why in the hell can't they just have a flat fee for every MB I go over in a given month? The math is super easy, I'll show you: $15/1000MB = fucking charge me 15 cents for every MB I go over.

Remember in the old days when people actually used their cell phones for telephonic purposes? You'd get 200 minutes a month or whatever, and when you went over, you got charged by the minute for all the extra time. Hell, some telecom companies advertised that they billed by the second, so if you talked for 5 minutes and 30 seconds, you paid for that, not 6 minutes.

Bottom line, Rogers needs to implement this sort of fee structure, anything else is completely unjust.



Imagine if you went to your local Esso and pumped $20.01 worth of gas and they rounded it up to $25. First off, you'd be pissed because that's fucked up. Second, if that was just "the way it is", you'd pump the next $4.99 if you had room in your tank because what the hell, you're paying for it.

But if Rogers is going to charge me $15 for 999.5MB of unused data, what the hell am I supposed to do? Stream porn until I reach the 2GB ? I mean that sounds fun and all, but that's what McDonalds WiFi (Powered by Bell) is for.