Blessed by the Potato

I just got a letter today saying that the price of my Rogers Extreme service will go up by $7/month (15%) starting August. Apparently, they haven’t even properly told their CSRs, who are mostly finding out from irate customers who’ve been getting these letters this week and calling to complain.

I have to wonder if Rogers is trying to kill off its extreme tier of service now. This is a substantial price increase for a fairly marginal increase in speeds (more than double upload, and almost double the cap, but only going from 5 to 6 Mbps down). They even encourage people to downgrade to the “express” tier in the notice.

Edit: that seems to be the current conspiracy theory: Rogers’ network couldn’t handle the extra upload of extreme, and throttling has largely been circumvented lately, so they’re now trying to kill off the tier (or really make people pay for the upload bandwidth & cap) by upping the downstream speed of express (it’s already where extreme was 2 years ago) and encouraging people to switch down.