I read an article recently in The Globe and Mail (a national Canadian daily newspaper) about a new notification system from Rogers (a major Canadian Internet Service Provider) that lets users know when they are approaching their bandwidth download/upload limit.

The article cites various internet and privacy gurus who suggest that this new technology is nothing short of insidious and misleading (with the notable exception of Cynthia Brumfield from IP Democracy, who sees it as just another notification).

In case you’re wondering, here’s what the actual screenshot looks like:

Annoying? Yep, I’d be a bit annoyed with Rogers deciding to take up half my screen space with their bandwidth notification. Pure evil? Hardly. Also note the ‘click here if you don’t want to receive this message in the future’ in the middle of the screen.

What the article completely misses the point on however, is the bandwidth cap itself. I first ran into bandwidth caps when dealing with Videotron (another major Canadian ISP), where I received a surprise bill of several hundred dollars for exceeding the bandwidth cap that was concealed in the fine print of my contract.

Rogers and Videotron claim that they institute such caps out of necessity, in order to maintain consistently high speeds on their networks (much the way they throttle the speed of certain protocols, such as BitTorrent traffic).

The problem with this is, these services were originally advertised as unlimited — and customers often sign a contract for a few years of service with the ISP. Rogers has angered many, many customers by going this route, not to mention that the ‘network speed’ excuse doesn’t really hold water.

The structure of telecommunications services in Canada has been established in a way that provides consumers with little or no choice. For high speed cable internet, almost every Canadian has only the choice of their own giant telco — which in Ontario happens to be Rogers.

But Rogers’ issues are not limited to just bandwidth caps. Take their cellular phone dataplans for example — some plans are up to 23 times more expensive than a comparable plan in the U.S. For a comparison, “transferring 500MB a month can cost $1,600 with Rogers Wireless, whereas it costs only $69 in the States and $74 in Rwanda“.

But I’m not trying to pick on Rogers. How about an $85 000 data bill from Bell Mobility? Or the obvious collusion between all telcos who charge the same $6.95 charge to every cellular phone customer in Canada, regardless of plan, location or network? If they’re going to charge that fee, they should at least have to advertise their prices with that fee included.

The list goes on and on. True competition between telcos is the only remedy to this situation — but until there is an external catalyst (strong foreign competition in Canada, government intervention, or something of the like), the Canadian telecommunications customer is going to be the one to suffer financially — and suffer every time they make a phone call or browse the internet.