Back in April, Canadian cable operator Cogeco hoisted metered billing on the back of their customers, applying caps as low as 10GB per month and overages as high as $2.50 a month 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.

I don't understand how they can charge for overages if they can't properly meter their services -Cogeco customer, complaining about Cogeco's new, broken meters.

After a several month adjustment period where customer usage was tracked but not billed, Cogeco was supposed to start billing in June. Judging from posts to our Cogeco forum, the process isn't going particularly smoothly for most customers, in part because the bandwidth usage monitor Cogeco is using doesn't work.

Many users are getting e-mail alert notifications with consumption numbers that don't match the consumption indicated in Cogeco's online usage-tracking portal. Others aren't seeing accurate amounts on either. Some aren't having any bandwidth usage registered whatsoever. It looks like Cogeco hasn't started billing yet which is good -- given they wouldn't know what they were billing for.

"Not only does the meter only update once a day, now when we do call in we can't get a accurate count of what the bandwidth totals are or what the bandwidth tool says," complains one user. "I don't understand how they can charge for overages if they can't properly meter their services," says another. "At 6 days and counting with no recorded bandwidth usage; really looking forward to seeing what I end up with when it decides to work," says a third.

Here in the States, cable operator Cablevision has publicly stated they don't think metered billing is a good idea because it confuses your customers and deters use of your product. Of course Cablevision can't afford to impose meters anyway, given they're engaged in fierce competition in the NYC metro market with also-unmetered and uncapped Verizon FiOS. Competition deters carriers from shifting to the per-byte model, which of course tells you plenty about the quality of competition in Cogeco markets.