Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

Rethinking Rogers
I had heard through Slashdot a couple of weeks or so ago Rogers, my lSP for the past several years was dropping its Usenet service for its customers. Which included me. I've been a medium- to heavy-user of Usenet for years, so I was disappointed by this, but I figured I'd be able to make up for things via using P2P services, such as Bittorrent.

Then I noticed that my current Bittorrent downloads had next to no traffic. I could see one drying up, but two was unlikely. So I went searching and sure enough I found this, saying that in addition to dropping Usenet service Rogers was throttling P2P traffic to next to nothing.

The reasons for this are to try and increase available bandwidth, but I have to ask: what is the point of having high bandwidth Internet service you cannot use it for whatever purpose you want? It even appears as though regular downloads are slowly than usual – so if everything is being capped, it can hardly be called high-speed anymore. If I was an online gamer I would care, but I don't do much of that.

So am really re-thinking about switching from Rogers to another provider. The only real hassle would be changing my default email address, which has been the same for at least 6 or so years. That and re-setting the router to deal with a different ISP, and possibly any contractual agreements I am not aware of.

For the moment I found I can use BitComet adequately for my downloads, as it uses a different port than most bittorrent software (a suggestion that came from the Rogers forum). But that is not likely to last, so over the holidays will search in earnest for a different provider and figure out what the ramifications are of making the switch.

Figure the best way to register my protest is to not give them my money anymore. I certainly won't recommend them to anyone anymore either. It's a pity because while their service up until now has not been what I would call flawless, I have been happy with it. I can understand their reasons for doing this, but charging me the same for what is essentially a hobbled service makes no sense to me as a consumer, so bye bye Rogers...