Monday, October 3, 2011

Rogers Ultimate

I complained to Rogers about my ridiculous bill the other day and they helped me out with a few improvements, which I appreciate. One of them was a 1 year trial of their fastest Internet package (Ultimate) for the price of Extreme Plus, which I am paying for. Thus, instead of 25Mbps down and 1Mbps up, I now enjoy 50Mbps down and 2Mbps up.

Or do I?

You see, since they switched me over, the uplink has performed as advertised, regularly testing on speedtest.net at about 1.9Mbps, as good as it gets on Rogers (i.e. I have never actually got what I paid for so I am fairly happy to just get close.)

But the downlink has actually been slower. Yes, you read the right. I was consistently getting 23Mbps over the 6 months prior to this changes and now I am happy to see 20Mbps. I have had days where it falls below that to 18 or less.

Not only am I getting less than advertised by a substantial margin (less than half), but I am getting less than I did when I was on a lesser service. WTF?

This is just one of those quirks you have to get used to with Rogers. Every little detail must be checked and rechecked if you want to get what you actually pay for … it’s very tiring and I really wish that Bell would hurry up with Fiber to my neighborhood … they are half way with the Internet service already there, but I would prefer to switch all services at once. So I would like them to get that TV service going here and crank up the competition for my bandwidth …

Update: I got this result on 9 Oct 2011 … it is slightly better, but still less than half of what I pay for …

And here is a painful result sent by a friend in the Netherlands … her speeds are through the roof compared with Canadian speeds … and I expect that she pays less for them since Canada has the highest fees for wireless and data in the world …

1523312619