I work for Qwest in the states and am quite famular with how their system works, early termination charges are only valid with a third party verifer to confirm the customer actually agreed to the terms, without it the customer is NOT liable in the court system. Also there are no bandwidth limits, nor are there with any ISP in the states that I’ve heard of, so this is a HUGE scam.

Also service charges are outrages probably over 95% of that go into the pockets of the corporation. Everyone has access to the internet, their trick is they put a block on it and restrict your access until you pay and a tech just comes out and removes the block.

Seeing how they’ve never charged for bandwidth for over 50 years it looks like unlimited amounts of data can be transferred at no cost to them, and everyone is already recieving the service so theres no cost to provide you with it, so basicly the internet should be free.

I can only imagine that we are in the beginning stages of these companies controlling the internet, a month ago Rogers and Bell announced they were going to lower they’re bandwidth limits for all packages, further restricting your access and I doubt they’ll stop there.

I pay a Whopper 230.00/Month reason its so high I have 2 Modems @ 16Mbits/s and 1DVR with Digi Cable so the break down is 140.00 for internet and rest is on cable.

I was told by Cogeco that they are suppose to let you know if they are doing any kinda work in the area…but they don’t so if you try to call they don’t do anything they just say it will be up soon…thats bs cause one time it was down for about 7hrs.

They Give you referb. Modems that break down like I had happened just today…i called them all they could say reset it and restart computer…didn’t fix…AGENT: we’ll have to send out a technicain out tomorrow…thinking to myself ok no internet for a whole day I don’t think so. so I pluggeds in my Rocket stick from Rogers yes i said rogers and surfing the net with that.

As for the bandwidth capps I hate them I do alot of business so that intales alot of big files being transfered back and forth and sometimes I get close to going over my 125GB limit. its actually a joke because when i had Shaw out west I had no limit. and I paid less.

On Monday I am going to:

Cogeco Cable Head Office
950 Syscon Road
P.O. Box 5076, Stn Main
Burlington, Ontario
L7R 4S6

They Don’t get paid until they fix. I think I did enough venting right now.

Being a Cogeco subscriber as well, I am thoroughly disappointed with the company. This is a total cash grab.

If they really wanted to curb downloading, i believe they should have a cap, but with a much higher limit. Say 500gig or something along those lines. That would help with the bandwidth issues with the serious down-loaders that do numerous terabytes in a month, but not affect the average users who just surfing the web, watching some videos, downloading iTunes, etc.

In addition, you forgot to mention in this article, or you may not be aware of it is Cogeco’s “Three Strikes and You’re Out” rule. Basically, go over your cap three months in a row, and your account is terminated. Even though you have paid for an overage.

Just outrageous.

It’s really frustrating that Cogeco has a monopoly on the market in our area, and there is no competition what-so-ever.

I know you mentioned Bell in your blog post, but truly it’s not a competitor as it’s a completely different type of service, with different speeds, etc. associated with it.

I’m pretty sure this is how Skynet started.

Good post bro.

However, it is definitely annoying as a consumer, especially for a first time issue. I am surprised they couldn’t fix that for you.