Canadian ISP (Rogers) Begins Testing Content Injection

[Rob Williams]

From our front-page news:

Because of the power that your ISP holds, it's been worried for some time that they could easily take advantage of your web-surfing to exploit a variety of scenarios. One of these came to light this past June, when a certain Texas ISP was caught inserting advertisements into webpages - even those that didn't have ads to begin with. Those that had ads, had some replaced.

There are a variety of other scenarios though, such as tracking, censorship and something that Rogers, a Canadian ISP, has just begun trialing.. injection of notices. According to Ars Technica, Rogers have injected bandwidth-usage notices into the Google.com homepage, as you can see in the thumbnail below. This... is wrong, and notices like these should be sent to the default ISP e-mail address, not pushed in your face into your internet.

I'm a Rogers Cable/Internet subscriber, but haven't seen such messages yet. I also don't think I come anywhere close to my monthly bandwidth allotment either, which might be why. While such a simple notice being injected into your page isn't a huge deal, it's notable because it could be a sign of what's to come, or at least what's possible.

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Credit: Lauren Weinstein </td></tr></tbody></table>
Despite the fact that the message is exclusively a notice to subscribers about the service rather than commercial content, some proponents of network neutrality believe that third-party modification of web content-particularly at the ISP-level-fundamentally changes the nature of the Internet in detrimental ways.

Source: Ars Technica
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[madstork91]

They charge you by the ****ing GB up there?

WTFH?

 

[Rob Williams]

As far as I know, most ISPs charge users extra if they go over their monthly allowance, which in most cases is 60GB. Anything over is $1.50 per, which really, is not too unreasonable. When I first got a DSL connection in 1999, it cost $43.00 per month for 5GB of bandwidth per month. Each additional GB was $5.00, which at the time didn't even seem so bad... especially once I got rid of my paper route ;-)

Here are the current prices with Rogers, as of 12/12/07. It always surprises me to know that I had a super-fast DSL connection eight years ago, and it cost me less than the standard connection today.

<table style="border-collapse: collapse;" align="center" border="1" bordercolor="#000000" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" width="300"><tbody><tr><td>Extreme Plus</td><td>18Mbps</td><td>90GB</td><td>$99.95</td></tr><tr><td>Extreme</td><td>8Mbps</td><td>100GB</td><td>$52.95</td></tr><tr><td>Express</td><td>7Mbps</td><td>60GB</td><td>$44.95</td></tr><tr><td>Lite</td><td>1Mbps</td><td>60GB</td><td>$32.95</td></tr><tr><td>Ultra-Lite</td><td>256Kbps</td><td>60GB</td><td>$22.95</td></tr></tbody></table>
The last one in particular is humorous. In order to hit your 60GB allowance, you'd have to cap your download for a straight 27 days.

 

[madstork91]

you dont think they did a cost benefit for that do you? 0.o

... the express is such a jump in speed from lite...

 

[Rob Williams]

The Extreme is not much of a jump from Express either, which makes the extra $8 seem like a waste. Of course, I think they are selling the extra bandwidth allowance than the actual speed difference. I might try out the Extreme Plus in the future, maybe after the new PC is built. I don't have an "extreme" need for such speed, but it would be very useful at times.

 

[Merlin]

As far as I know, most ISPs charge users extra if they go over their monthly allowance, which in most cases is 60GB. Anything over is $1.50 per, which really, is not too unreasonable. When I first got a DSL connection in 1999, it cost $43.00 per month for 5GB of bandwidth per month. Each additional GB was $5.00, which at the time didn't even seem so bad... especially once I got rid of my paper route ;-)

Here are the current prices with Rogers, as of 12/12/07. It always surprises me to know that I had a super-fast DSL connection eight years ago, and it cost me less than the standard connection today.

<TABLE style="BORDER-COLLAPSE: collapse" borderColor=#000000 cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=2 width=300 align=center border=1><TBODY><TR><TD>Extreme Plus</TD><TD>18Mbps</TD><TD>90GB</TD><TD>$99.95</TD></TR><TR><TD>Extreme</TD><TD>8Mbps</TD><TD>100GB</TD><TD>$52.95</TD></TR><TR><TD>Express</TD><TD>7Mbps</TD><TD>60GB</TD><TD>$44.95</TD></TR><TR><TD>Lite</TD><TD>1Mbps</TD><TD>60GB</TD><TD>$32.95</TD></TR><TR><TD>Ultra-Lite</TD><TD>256Kbps</TD><TD>60GB</TD><TD>$22.95</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
The last one in particular is humorous. In order to hit your 60GB allowance, you'd have to cap your download for a straight 27 days.

I guess those are the download speeds, but what is the upload speed?

 

[Merlin]

http://www.speedtest.net/result/211307050.png

 

[moon111]

Bell Sympatico. Most expensive DSL connection. (They do offer fibre optic service in some areas in Toronto I believe.) Comes with garbage antivirus suite and a wireless router/modem combo.

 

[Rob Williams]

Merlin, you have a great upload, and one I'd love to have. On the Extreme Plus package, I think it's 1Mbps up. Right now, my -real- upload speed is around 60Kb/s, or 512Kbit/s.