Canadian cable operator Cogeco has been on quite the anti-competitive tear the last few years, foisting metered billing on the back of their customers, and applying caps as low as 10GB per month and overages as high as $2.50 a gigabyte on top of existing tiers. When customers complained, Cogeco insulted customer intelligence by insisting the move wasn't about making money. Cogeco then decided to raise monthly rates as well, just for good measure. For added enjoyment, they've never really been able to get their meters working properly, resulting in huge overcharging issues for subscribers.

As such, it's not too surprising to see Cogeco report this week that they lost around 9,000 Canadian customers while also taking a bath on their Portuguese cable expansion plans. What was surprising was the way Cogeco CEO Louis Audet responded to those losses; bizarrely blaming smart customers who left the company looking for a better value:In other words, Cogeco decided to overbill users and offer sub-par service, then blame the customers who wisely started to look elsewhere for better and more affordable services. Audet should probably be happy, since the sorry state of Canadian broadband competition is what allows Cogeco to overbill users for broadband services in the first place. If customers had more choices, Audet would suddenly find himself awash in "undesirables" and apologizing profusely in the hopes of getting those users back.