RBUA.ORG

alien8d · Forum Moderator Joined: 09 Feb 2007 Posts: 140

Sadly, it comes down to the fact that they really only seem to understand parts of the business. Analogue cable? No problem. That's their historical business. Within the capabilities they can get you a halfway decent analogue cable TV signal.

When things went Digital, they end up in an area of less understanding. Sure, they understand the analogue delivery system between the nodes and you, but not well enough to understand that certain analogue problems can totally destroy a digital signal. They can work on that because they can see the results, like pixellation.

When they went to internet, then they were blind. There was no picture to look at to show what was going wrong. I can't tell you what is going on with a cable signal if it won't pass digital without getting out test instruments that Rogers isn't going to load on every truck ... because they treat Digital and Internet as black boxes that work or don't work.

It's frustrating dealing with Rogers attempts to blame the customer. I remember when I had the TeraPro modem ... and they cut the speed from 3Mbps to 1.5Mbps. At 3 Mbps I got about 1.2 to 1.3 download and thought this was normal given where we were located. I know better now.

When they reduced the speed to 1.5, my speed fell to about 800 max. Pardon? If the line is capable of 1.2, why did reducing the max speed still cause my speed to fall. I complained and complained and got nowhere. I eventually got a customer service manager who actually agreeed that there must be something wrong. They weren't sure what though. My modem profile was correct.

I discovered something that Rogers didn't seem to know about their CMTS cards. Terayon sold CMTS cards that set the absolute maximum downstream speed as a multiple of 4, 6, or 8 times the set upstream speed. At 3 / 384, my max absolute download was 1.5 Mbps (which was consistent with the 1.2 or so I was getting), but when they dropped the speeds to 1.5 / 192, my downstream speed max was just under 800. Surprise Surprise. We were connected to a 4 times card!

I told them of this and they were surprised ... so offered me to be the first DOCSIS customer on our phub and delivered an Ericsson Piperider modem. Perfect speeds.

They just didn't understand their own equipment!

daveycanuck · Newcomer Joined: 15 Feb 2007 Posts: 5

Roger's defines 'the Internet' as web-based browsing using port 80 or port 443 and SMTP traffic between your host and a Rogers/Yahoo webserver on port 25. That's it.

However, we all know that there is more to the Internet that just that. VoIP, VPN, P2P, FTP, IM, streaming audio and video... and the list goes on. These are not niche services anymore - these are core and vital parts of 'the Internet'. So when I sign a 'contract' for 'fast service great for sharing photos and files online' (straight from the Rogers website) is it not reasonable for me to expect that I can in fact share photos and files online using whichever application and protocol that I want to? Why am I allowed to download 60gb per month using HTTP but not using P2P on port 32750?

Just wondering...

Admin

alien8d · Forum Moderator Joined: 09 Feb 2007 Posts: 140

Actually, admin, Rogers turned off their proxy farm last year because in spite of its size, its performance was rather pathetic, so most people started disabling the cache. Also, a lot of the sites that people routinely visit are non-cacheable ... like news sites, weather sites etc.

Whilst they have these enormous pipes around the province, they're now running everything imagineable through them ... digital phone, wireless phone and internet.

Admin · Posted: Thu Feb 22, 2007 12:31 am Post subject:

alien8d · Forum Moderator Joined: 09 Feb 2007 Posts: 140

Rogers focus is on network machines. They don't deal well with anything that is not a router or CMTS. Last night their website www.rogers.com went awol, lost passwords. Altogether a real mess.

They dropped their own news service because they couldn't manage it and obviously resented paying Compaq to run it (the server farm was almost constantly out of sync). So they outsourced to giganews. Then that probably got too expensive so they dropped it altogether.

Then they decided that they didn't want to manage their portal page, email or customer web pages, so they hopped in bed with Yahoo! giving users just a little more than Yahoo! already gave users for free ... which courtesy of the portal was a means of funding the Extreme service. There are rumours that they may actually drop Yahoo! cobranding! Somebody's learning that portals don't work ... Somebody didn't get the message when the excite and @home went belly up ... portals don't work.

Rogers even has problems with its DNS servers, particularly after they distributed them out and stopped using just aliases in the phubs. They were having problems to with the DHCP servers when they distributed those. Not sure if that's entirely fixed, but at least I haven't heard as many complaints recently!

Bottom line is that Rogers skills focus far more on "the network" than being an ISP.

JackRussell · Cool Newbie Joined: 02 Oct 2004 Posts: 34

alien8d · Forum Moderator Joined: 09 Feb 2007 Posts: 140

Whilst the Terms of Service and End User Agreement and Acceptable Use Policies permit Rogers to do just about anything they please, there are a few issues that could be argued.

This applies to lots of ISPs and not just to Rogers ...

The first is the assumption that use = acceptance that the ISP relies upon, since you sign nothing.

The second and bigger one is the one presented when a contract is so one sided as a take it or leave it and the promotional materials are misleading. It comes to a scenario known as "what would any reasonable person expect / think" which can be used in a legal case.

The last one is that a lot of the terms of the "contract" are probably unenforceable, and the ISP then says that even if some are unenforceable then the uncontested clauses still stand. The most probable failing term is that of forced arbitration. Canadian judiciary do not like people being essentially coerced by such take it or leave it contracts into giving up their rights.

The down side to all this is that because internet is an unregulated service, there's nothing to say that an ISP must provide you with service unless you can prove discriminatory practices. So, you could be in a situation where you win but you lose in that a court may indeed agree that you have a claim, but the ISP could deny providing you with ongoing internet connectivity.

So, to take on an ISP the size of the majors, you need pretty deep pockets!

mr-b · Fast Newbie Joined: 30 Nov 2001 Posts: 92 Location: Canada

alien8d · Forum Moderator Joined: 09 Feb 2007 Posts: 140

I think the poster was referring to that which is commonly available. Even in places like Ottawa and Toronto, such wireless services are for special purposes only.

daveycanuck · Newcomer Joined: 15 Feb 2007 Posts: 5

I stumbled upon an interesting new development. Rogers is now explicitly advertisting that users who whish to use BitTorrent should sign up for the 'Extreme' service.

On the Rogers website there is a tool that asks you what types of functions you do and how fast you expect them to occur (http://www.shoprogers.com/store/cable/internet/select.html). The page returns a suggestion as to which service is appropriate for you. BitTorrent is explicitly listed and defined along with YouTube and MySpace under the 'Watch Videos and Movies' function.

This would seem to indicate an implicit promise that if I sign up for the recommended service (it suggested 'Extreme') then I should be able to use this technology?

Is there a legal hole that can be exploited here?

alien8d · Forum Moderator Joined: 09 Feb 2007 Posts: 140

Legal? No. False Advertising complaint to the Advertising Standards Council? Probably.

daveycanuck · Newcomer Joined: 15 Feb 2007 Posts: 5

I just tested BitTorrent at home and I'm getting consistently good performance. Between 150 and 200 kbps download speeds within Azeurus. Getting approx. 5mbps service at speedtest.rogers.com with Azeurus running and 6.8mbps service with it stopped. It appears that they may have switched from blocking BitTorrent to a more intelligent appliction of QOS to simply control the allotted bandwidth. We'll see.