#295

Here is a very interesting Globe And Mail letter (Italics are mine) to the editor by a man named Barrie Jones from Pickering who is as fed up with Rogers as most people seem to be (me included). He has some excellent points and he didn't even cover the rest of the issues we're facing such as the death of bittorrent, usenet being taken away on Dec. 15 and other nonsense meanwhile making us pay the same price as always (however, it is important to note that they as of yet have not enforced the 100gb up/down per month limit as their calculator is very unreliable): Dear Editor: As one of the people affected by Rogers' new bit cap, I have a few points that I have brought up to Rogers. I have asked, and also suggest it to all Rogers users, that they no longer allow Rogers to bill them via e-mail. Emailed billings do use up a small percentage of my bit cap. It's a small point indeed, but one that has a direct impact on Rogers. By forcing Rogers to do this by post, it will have to pay for the paper and postage. I have also asked that monitoring of my usage be made available via software from my house. I understand that Rogers has tools in place for monitoring the usage, but by having to visit the Rogers website to view that usage, I am using up a percentage of my bandwidth, therefore using a portion of my cap every time I visit the page. This also requires that the information be accurate and honest. Realistically, can we trust a company that is actively trying to curtail usage to deliver accurate statistics without some form of monitoring? A senior support person told me that this page is cached on my hard drive and does not reload each time. However, for security reasons, I and many other users regularly clear our browser caches. This means a 1 or 2 megabyte hit each time I check my usage. Rogers told me to get software off the Net to do this, but this will cost me to buy the program(s). I believe Rogers should provide this to me because they are implementing this policy shift. Rogers also told me that it has no mechanism in place to deal with disputes over usage amounts. So we have no ability to contest their accusations. I therefore asked to have monthly Internet billing include a complete breakdown of my usage. I point out to you that cellphone users are provided this service free of charge — I buy 50 minutes of air time for cellphone, which is analogous to my 60 GB cap. I'd like to know what I'm using. On my bill. Rogers should also do a better job addressing spam. So far, it's highly inadequate. Each piece of spam uses a portion of my bit cap. Rogers is not doing enough to eliminate spam, which in turn cheats me by a small percentage each month of my 60GB limit. Rogers should also change all of their Web pages so the graphics are at a minimum. Each time I have to visit a Rogers page, I use up a portion of my bandwidth/bit cap downloading unnecessary graphics. I believe all users who subscribed to Rogers' Extreme service and paid the extra cash for the high-speed modems should receive a rebate or credit on their accounts, because they are now no longer useful. We bought this service based on expected usage [yes, I paid the $100 to buy the modem to take advantage of the Extreme (6mb down/800kb up) service. 100gb/month breaks down to about 3gb of data per day, and that's uploads AND downloads. So basically you could only download a 1.5gb file and upload to a 1.00 ratio per day. For "Extreme" this is ridiculous. Got worse: A while after I bought it they then screwed torrents and most p2p by using boxes such as SANDVINES and PCUBE, which check the headers of all downloaded files to make sure there's no Torrent signature in it, and when it finds it, it kills your connection on it. It has squashed uploads of torrents to less than 1kb/s for all files. All users are not affected at once as they move these boxes around from place to place right now. But if you check out the Rogers Forum on dslreports.com you can see for yourself a lot of complaints regarding this issue from several areas. Rogers is effectively fucking their customers over, who have not only paid the $100 for the modem but the monthly $50...and for what? To browse the web faster? No one needs Extreme to view a news site]. The person I spoke to at Rogers even went so far as to suggest I curtail my usage of services such as newsgroups, streaming Internet radio, on-line gaming and downloading software updates to conserve my usage [no joke. They are this stupid/callous. If you call and bitch about torrents being fucked, they tell you, "We do not support torrents. If you want to use them take your business elsewhere." Pretty stupid considering torrents are gaining popularity. Even World Of Warcraft uses bittorrent to transfer updates to players as it is a more effective and less costly way to mass distribute. The torrent-killing is really going to fuck us soon when more websites use torrents rather than straight downloads to lower bandwidth costs]. I asked him then what was the point of having high-speed then? He avoided answering. We Rogers users are fed up. We need a change, we need support and we need it fast. Barrie Jones, Pickering, Ont.