CBC says it costs $30 / MB to stream data when roaming. Is this true?

[cmd123]

Hi,

In this week's CBC article, which has received significant public attention, Rogers roaming rates are summarized with the following line:

"Rogers' (and Fido's) pay-per-use charge is $30 to stream one minute (one MB) of YouTube video."

This seems expensive to me. Without discussing the rates of your competitors (it should be pointed out my initial post that directly mentioned them was removed as it was considered Spam), I think this would be a good opportunity to comment on why these rates are as high as they are, and how this translates to a better user experience.

[RogersDonavan]

The majority of our customer travel to the US; lauching this spring we will have new pricing which is quite attractive at $7.99/day - upto 50MB (works out to $0.16/MB).  For those travelling internationally and plan to use a lot of data, we recommend that they purchase a roaming data pass which offers rates as low as $3/MB.  In addition, the data pass offers alerts and hard stops once you've used all of your MBs.  The $30/MB is only intended for very light usage (i.e. <1MB) and should not be used for streaming music/videos.  In addition, we encourage people to use wifi for heavy usage.  There are more tips at:

http://techessentials.rogers.com/managingBudget/HowToRoamWorryFree.aspx