Tech
Rogers Upgrades Express Users to 10Mbps
I was just surfing the web and got this strange and wonderful pop-in (not pop-up) courtesy of Rogers Internet (I'm not sure how they manage to hijack my browser to aggressively deliver this important message to me, but that's a whole other issue).
Apparently Rogers will be upgrading users of their "Express" internet service from 7Mbps to 10Mbps speed. At no cost. Users of the "Lite" service will jump from 1Mbps to 3Mbps. At no cost. And "Extreme" users? They kinda get the shaft.
The upgrade effectively brings the speed of the "Express" service on par with that of their "Extreme" service (the only notable differences now remaining being a higher monthly usage cap and lower additional usage charge on the Extreme service).
Is this jump from 7Mbps to 10Mbps going to make much of a difference? Perhaps. But if they're able to throttle and shape our usage anyhow (i.e. "active network management"), it's almost a moot point.
Here's today's press release from Rogers.
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Sarah, can you explain what the 'cutting off' entails?
I went with a dry-loop DSL from http://www.teksavvy.com/ and it's $41/month for 200GB. (That includes taxes and $7 which goes to Bell for providing the copper wire to my house.)
Other ways to untangle yourself from Roger's:
* cancel your cable
* switch to www.opendns.com so you don't get roger's ads when you misspell a URL (that might also prevent those creepy pop-ins)
If you create a flickr account using your @rogers.com ID, then you used to get free Flickr Pro. I'll be missing this feature when it goes away....
I got a good deal on my Rogers Cable internet when I simply remarked on the phone that I was shopping around and was just calling to check on prices. They immediately offered me a discount per month and waived the setup fees and modem rental fees.
So while you may get more bandwidth than me at 200 GB, you're still stuck with Bell's traffic shaping, so I can't imagine how you'd even utilize that 200 GB anyways when your speeds are just as slow as the rest ofus.
As an Express user, I'm not pleased at all with the increase. The increase in speed does nothing to my paltry upload, and only ensures that I'll hit the 60GB cap faster than before.
Come just west of the GTA (to at least Oakville) and use Cogeco. Midrange has been 10Mbps for a while now ... 16Mbps is the top range with them. And their service is reliable to boot.
Matthew is correct in suggesting you can use a customer firmware on your router to get around this issue, although it only works with specific DSL companies that aren't Bell.
Also, I'm probably arguing semantics here, but *all* bitorrent traffic is throttled, not just the illegal stuff. At last check, Rogers is not employing Deep Packet Inspection techniques - the only way you can be notified for downloading illegal content is by downloading honeypot torrents or links set up by those in the industry, who in turn notify your ISP.
Only a few providers support MLPPP in Canada. They have great customer service as well if you need help installing it.
To give you some background on how ISP's go about shaping or throttling traffic. I know from experience that ISP's utilize solution from Sandvine Inc one of many available to ISP'S, which in simple terms tells the remote server to drop the connection, then when your bit torrent client tries to establish it again, it takes quite a while, thus the "slowness" you notice within your bit torrent client.
@Lioness: how did you complain?
I cannot imagine a company any worse than Bell.
I filled in a form online, putting "degradation in service" (one of their options) as the reason for my complaint. When they wrote back and said that the reason the agreement with Yahoo (who owns Flickr) had changed was because it had changed, I replied and complained about their non answer.
I also called and was shunted from the regular Rogers gal to an IT guy, who admitted that although it was an internet issue, it had nothing to do with his area of expertise, and he then forwarded me to someone who knew what I was talking about but did not offer to lower my monthly fee (not that I expected it but it was worth a try). It was this last man who said they did track complaints.
Where would be the most effective address to send our complains?
I can tell you how to install it though. The modem they send you is fine, what you do need is a specific type of router that can run Tomato Firmware, most people use the Linksys WRT54GL. (It has to be those letters EXACTLY) The firmware with MLPPP and instructions can be found here: http://fixppp.org/index.php?p=documentation
Simply download and install Tomato onto your router, turn on MLPPP and in the settings and you're set. You'll want to keep it Single Link as multi-link is for people with more than one modem. If you don't notice a speed increase you may have to call Teksavvy to make sure they have MLPPP activated on your account.
http://torontoist.com/2007/12/dr_frankenwebs.php
They've been doing it since the end of 2007.