Cogeco announces new P2P tax
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- Cogeco, the largest cable-Internet operator in Ontario, has come up with a cool new way to improve its service and make lots of cash at the same time.
And it’s really, really simple.
Charge customers more.
Some of them, anyway.
Taking it’s lead from Bell ‘We hate our users’ Canada, it’s targeting file sharers saying it plans to hit them with a P2P Tax.
It’ll be, “charging its heaviest users between $30 and $50 a month extra for chewing up bandwidth,” says The Hamilton Spectator.
“We’re doing this so we can give the best service to all of our customers,” the story has Marie Carrier, Cogeco’s director of corporate miscommunications saying.
“This is not something we’re doing to make money; it’s to better manage our service.”
Of course. 
As the story notes, Rogers and Bell Sympatico both decided to screw their customers last year with added ‘caps’ and special charges.
Now, “Starting June 1, customers will be charged between $1 and $2.50 for each gig of data over their limit,” says the Hamilton Spectator. “Overage charges will be capped at between $30 and $50 a month depending on your plan.
So far, the only people Cogeco plans to fuc – sorry, help — are residential users. But plans are being developed for business users as well, the story adds.
The pic shows Cogeco boss Louis Audet telling executives how much money he expects to make from his company’ s innovative P2P tax.
Good luck with staying in business, Louis.
(Thanks, Marc)
Hamilton Spectator – April, 2009
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April 14th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
so if they monitor your bandwidth and charge accordingly, are they going to monitor your cable tv watching habits and pro rate that as well?
April 14th, 2009 at 3:03 pm
“…are they going to monitor your cable tv watching habits and pro rate that as well?”
What makes you think they’re not already doing that?
8 /
April 14th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
It’s just been a veritable revolving door with this stuff, hasn’t it?!
“Bandwidth hogs”, “P2P is evil”, “Enhancing our users’ experience”, and “Charge the evildoers”, which really means “Charge them twice, since they’re already paying for it, and keep the propaganda machine running so people don’t see it that way.”
April 14th, 2009 at 4:06 pm
and what are they doing with the profits? certainly NOT putting fiber in the ground, they just want to milk the copper forever.
April 14th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
@surfer, its what Tom said.
Fast profits, then run.
April 14th, 2009 at 10:03 pm
Time Warner is pulling this crap in our city as well. There are gonna be a lot of people switching to AT&T by the time this is over. (It’s their only other option here)
April 14th, 2009 at 11:58 pm
You can’t steal someone else’s bandwidth. The real problem is they have oversold their resources if they are having problems with latency and lag. In Time-Warner’s case, it’s greed. Their cost per megabyte is at least triple what it cost for DSL. No way in the world I would stay with them in this sort of scam.
April 15th, 2009 at 1:38 am
They oversold nothing.
Its a game to steal your money
April 15th, 2009 at 6:12 am
This is precisely what happens when you have government supported monopolies. Inevitably the people always get screwed for the sake of corporate profits.
How about we all circumvent the ISPs and use a wireless based lan?
April 15th, 2009 at 10:56 pm
Wireless lan only works when you out in the middle of nowhere. If you are in high rise apartment buildings, that everyone would on the same ranges of frequencies and you’ll get dial up speeds. You are dividing down the bandwidth (correct usage here for transfer rates over time) by N users.
April 22nd, 2009 at 5:24 pm
If you ever seen the Engineering team at Cogeco, you would quickly realise they are a very unimaginative bunch.
Chris McFarlane, the newly promoted head of the division is a self described high school dropout and he is actually proud of that fact!
The network infrastructure is wired together like a Christmas tree and they are always struggling with congesion problems, especially on the upstreams. They can’t seem to get ahead of the curve, so what do they do, easy-raise prices. Their SONET ring is the laughing stock of the industry.
Cogeco, always hiring the talented. I hear they are recruiting the new Bell rejects in droves.