My grumbles with Rogers...

[CLIFFORD ILKAY]

Colin McGregor wrote:
> This is the letter I dropped off at Rogers head office
> this morning... Yes, I am annoyed with them... 
> 
> This afternoon a Rogers Technician found that
> squirrels had attacked the cable where it left the
> left the utility pole, and the cable from house to
> utility pole was replaced... Who knows if that will
> actually fix the problem... I do know it has come time
> to move on from Rogers...
[snip]

I have been experiencing periods of "laggy" service. Running mtr reveals 
that the first hop after my cable modem usually has at least 25% packet 
loss while at the worse times, it is upwards of 50 or 60%. I have shell 
accounts on various servers on various networks and it is particularly 
noticeable when I type something in the shell. I know it is not a 
loading issue on the servers in question nor any problem with the 
network at the other end because when I am at other locations, I can 
connect to the same servers with no lag or packet loss whatsoever. The 
packet loss is consistently on the first hop regardless of what the 
destination is and it there is no discernible pattern to when it is 
higher or lower.

When I called to report this, I was told I would have to connect 
directly to the cable modem with a Windows machine with no firewall and 
no router and that they could not see any problems on the line. Doing 
this involves some hassle on my part so I forgot about until yesterday, 
when once again, the lag on my various shells was intolerable. I shut 
down my Linux router/firewall, powered up an XP laptop, power-cycled the 
cable modem, and connected the XP laptop directly to the cable modem. 
Not surprisingly, WinMTR reported 70% packet loss on the first hop. I 
captured its output and mailed it to Rogers "support". I got back what 
seemed like a canned reply from a Mike H. in which I was asked to 
connect directly to the cable modem with a Windows machine, disable the 
firewall, get my IP address, ping some sites, run "tracert", and hit 
various "speed test" sites. They seem happy to dismiss the high packet 
loss as "normal" if the "speed test" site "proves" that they are 
supposedly delivering what they claim to be delivering. When I responded 
to Mike H.'s canned response and pointed out that "ping", for example, 
is not going to provide any more useful information than MTR to diagnose 
the problem and that I had already provided all that he had asked for, 
he escalated the case to their network support department, or so he 
claims. We shall see if this has any impact.

By the way Colin, your case underscores why one should not rely on the 
company from which you get your Internet connectivity for your email 
account(s). Your email address is part of your on-line identity. It 
costs next to nothing to register a domain and get it hosted. (Contact 
me if you need help.) Particularly when you are a published writer, it 
makes sense to have a permanent email address independent of your ISP.
-- 
Regards,

Clifford Ilkay
Dinamis Corporation
1419-3266 Yonge St.
Toronto, ON
Canada  M4N 3P6

<http://dinamis.com>
+1 416-410-3326
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