Canadian internet is disgusting. Even with all of the advantages, my roommates and I are getting screwed over. How is a poor single mom like this woman supposed to afford it?

I live in a house with a bunch of roommates, so we split the cost. We live in Ottawa, which is comparatively cheap for a city. We're a bunch of university students, and one of us is even in Comp Sci, so he really knows his stuff. We own (ok, comp sci guy owns) our own fancy router, home networking equipment, in-house cloud stuff, etc. We also get a massive post-secondary student discount on our internet service, and got our plan while a back-to-school special was occurring, discounting our service even more. We effectively get 1/3 of our internet bill knocked off to my roommate's excellent plan selection. We got the cheapest plan that had unlimited internet, to avoid data overage charges, since they can double your bill. So, bad financial planning is not the issue here. Our bootstraps are giving us wedgies, they're pulled up so high.

Rogers is the only ISP that adequately services our suburban subdivision -- our only option is Rogers because we chose to live in a cheaper-rent suburban area, rather than the ISP-plentiful (but pricey) downtown core. Rogers doesn't let us use our existing high-quality networking equipment; they force us to pay a rental fee for their hot pile of garbage (which they charitably dub a "router") every month. This is 100% standard, as I'm sure you all know. We pay around $100 per month for our plan and would pay more if it weren't for the great discounts we secured. We've been having routine internet outages in the past month, and slug-slow service, forcing us to use mobile data to do our homework at night (the buses stop running to our subdivision at 11:30pm cheap rent tho). Of course Rogers charges me $70 per month to have 500mb of shared data with my whole family, so I always rack up expensive data overage charges. All because internet is a necessity and I would fail my university degree if I didn't have internet at home.

To everybody questioning her financial planning skills as per rent costs and her internet plan -- consider that she's a busy-as-hell single mom, and she probably just picked the cheapest plan that the Rogers guy said would work. That's what I'd do. Not everybody has the time or knowledge to cherry-pick a plan like my techie roommate did. Also: even in cheap Ottawa, if you don't want to live in a literal rat hole piece of cockroach garbage, it's going to cost you upwards of $1000 for a two-bedroom in a so-so neighbourhood -- either a well-connected but shitty part of town, or a family-friendly but transit-deficient part of town. Keep in mind that a lot of poor people don't own cars, so they can't really "commute" the same as people who drive. It takes 7 minutes to drive to my university from my house, but it takes 45 minutes by bus. My mom commutes 1-1.5 hours each way by car each way to work. If you did that commute by public transit, Google Maps estimates a 3 hour commute each way. You can't just commute when you're poor.