Rogers sucks; Bell sucks; which one sucks less?

My 10Gb down/512k up is fine for VPN and working from home but I'm dropping Rogers wherever I can.

I switched to Vonage, 29.99 for all calling features and unlimited long distance, was paying the same for Home Phone plus rental and other fees they tacked on.

I'll switch to Teksavvy, especially if I keep Netflix, 60GB cap doesn't cut it, especially if I can play LESS and get a 300GB cap. I'll probably downgrade my cable TV and use netflix and download anything else I need. Only thing I really need TV for is hockey and Game of Thrones.

I don't think their bundle discount is worth it as their "fees" manage to nullify it, system access fee, digital services fee etc.

As I look at what people in other countries pay(and wow even across the river with Videotron in Quebec) I just know I am getting ripped off and I can't stand it.

shabbs wrote:Rogers Express is 12M down and 512K up.

Is your main issue that your line is not enough to work from home? How do you typically connect to your work? VPN with corporate laptop? Home PC with citrix gateway?

Are you responding to the original post in this thread, which was a year ago back in July?

Things are OK now. I don't think it was the upload speed. Rogers are still crooks, though.

wprager wrote:

shabbs wrote:Rogers Express is 12M down and 512K up.

Is your main issue that your line is not enough to work from home? How do you typically connect to your work? VPN with corporate laptop? Home PC with citrix gateway?

Are you responding to the original post in this thread, which was a year ago back in July?

Things are OK now. I don't think it was the upload speed. Rogers are still crooks, though.

Yeah, looks like I was. They don't call 'em Robbers for nothing.

I know this isn't about phones but I'm gonna try and buy an Iphone 4 (when the 5 comes out in October so the prices go down ) and I'm not sure which company to go with. I think rodgers is the only company that offers a repacement plan if the phone breaks? in MTL the contracts are like 3 years long so I'll bet mine breaks within that time so it's probably a good idea. anyone knows anything about other companies that could rival that? ones available in quebec?

If you're willing to setup your own dish, Bell offers a nice little advantage. This might have changed but when we went with Bell, they allowed up to 5 receivers on the same account. If you know the dish coordinates, you can have those receivers setup anywhere you want. For me, my parents, my brothers, myself, and the cottage (all different locations) are under one account. This means you have the same programming but the center ice package divided by five is much, much cheaper!

Flo The Action wrote:I know this isn't about phones but I'm gonna try and buy an Iphone 4 (when the 5 comes out in October so the prices go down ) and I'm not sure which company to go with. I think rodgers is the only company that offers a repacement plan if the phone breaks? in MTL the contracts are like 3 years long so I'll bet mine breaks within that time so it's probably a good idea. anyone knows anything about other companies that could rival that? ones available in quebec?

Just heard a Telus ad on the radio where they are pushing the iPhone 4 for $99 on a 3-year plan ($50/month).

Vandelay wrote:If you're willing to setup your own dish, Bell offers a nice little advantage. This might have changed but when we went with Bell, they allowed up to 5 receivers on the same account. If you know the dish coordinates, you can have those receivers setup anywhere you want. For me, my parents, my brothers, myself, and the cottage (all different locations) are under one account. This means you have the same programming but the center ice package divided by five is much, much cheaper!

Sounds a little suspicious. 5 receivers at different addresses? I'm thinking this (if still available) was meant for multiple units owned by the same customer, not spread around the extended family.

Rogers is horrible (IMO) with multiple outlets. What the *&^*% do they care how many TVs I choose to watch on? I can only watch on one at a time, so why does a second outlet cost me anything? Hell, I can buy a splitter myself and just run the wiring -- as long as it's inside my house I don't think they have a legal leg to stand on -- any lawyers out there? I mean, Bell won't fix it (and will charge you for the visit) if the problem is deemed to be beyond the demarcation point. Anyhow, the main reason I'm on VIP is I would hate paying for the second outlet. It's criminal, IMO.

I pay $77US for 16mbps Internet and Phone + $109 for Directv (all you can eat)

Number Twenty Nine wrote:I pay $77US for 16mbps Internet and Phone + $109 for Directv (all you can eat)

I see you eat well

Funny, though, I would have thought with all the complaints in Canada about how expensive internet is, you'd be paying less than $77 for internet plus phone. Did you mean home phone or mobile?

Rogers Express service is 12Mbps for $47 (last I heard it was 10 but 12 is what they claim online -- must be a recent change). Home phone (local only) is $27. I think you get 10% bundling discount so that brings it down to $67. For another $10 ($9 after bundling discounts) you can get 500 NA LD minutes, and if you add TV you get 15% discount for bundling. And you should always be able to get 20-30% off the total in the first year of a 2-year deal, so that's like another 10% discount.

Internet is $49.95, Phone $54.95 - $77 with bundle discount.

The cap is 250gb per month though. - Phone doesn't count towards cap.

Number Twenty Nine wrote:Internet is $49.95, Phone $54.95 - $77 with bundle discount.

The cap is 250gb per month though. - Phone doesn't count towards cap.

That's quite the hefty discount -- from $105 to $77 is a 27% drop and that's just two services? Are you sure that's just the bundling or is that an incentive discount? For example, Rogers offers their higher Internet plans at 50% for the first six months of a 1 year subscription,so that's 25% off.

I wonder why so much for the phone -- is it a landline or mobile? Mobile might explain it.

The only tier Rogers has with 250 GB cap is the Ultimate -- up to 50 Mbps down, 2M up for $99.95/month. The closes to yours in price is $47 for Express (which is what I have) -- 12Mbps down, 512K up and 60 GB cap. For some reason all of their plans give you up to 9 e-mails. Why would a typical family of 3.4 or whatever it is need 9 e-mail addresses, what with free web-based e-mail services available everywhere?

That's Comcast unlimited phone. Comcast doesn't have bundle discounts like in Canada. You need to call them to Wing Dang Doodle about the bill and then they throw you a bone like I got. Same with Directv. My base on Directv is $109, but my net after Wing Dang Doodle is more like $80.

After a year, the Wing Dang Doodle discounts drop off and you need to call in to Wing Dang Doodle some more.

Number Twenty Nine wrote:That's Comcast unlimited phone. Comcast doesn't have bundle discounts like in Canada. You need to call them to Wing Dang Doodle about the bill and then they throw you a bone like I got. Same with Directv. My base on Directv is $109, but my net after Wing Dang Doodle is more like $80.

After a year, the Wing Dang Doodle discounts drop off and you need to call in to Wing Dang Doodle some more.

Indeed. It's always a fight with these guys and there's no real advantage to switching either. All these companies are holding hands behind their backs. See how they band together when fighting regulators.

Then, if you cut off the TV and go to an antenna and Netflix, they jack up your internet costs until you finally decide there's not that much difference in cost for going back to TV...

Maybe we can bundle our banking with our TV, internet and phone soon for more "savings"...

http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/story/2011/09/06/rogers-bank.html

I pay $35/month for DSL internet with a 300GB cap, and $25/month for home phone - both with TekSavvy. Where I get hosed is cable TV. No good work-around for that yet. I get the VIP package with Rogers for around $80.

Just found a way to improve my P2P speeds on Rogers. This isn't new -- the post I read is from February of this year, but prior to making this change I was getting great fluctuations in my d/l speed -- occasionally coming close to 100 kB/s, but usually being in the teens-to-40s range (and often lower). Now it's consistently in the high 90s (and been like that over the last 10-15 minutes).

The change is to set uTorrent to only use TCP connections (seems the throttling from Rogers primarily affects UDP). Now, I have Express (which is 12 Mbps according to their latest website updates), which translates to 1,500 kB/s (simple divide by 8 to get from bits to bytes). Of course there's overhead, but even assuming 1/3 overhead I should still be getting 10 times more than what I'm actually getting. Still, it's a lot better than before.

To make the change, go to settings, then advanced, find bt.transp_disposition and set it to 5. This setting is a bitmap so 5 is actually 101, where the two 1s represent allows outgoing TCP and incoming TCP, and with just those two bits it effectively forces uTorrent to use only TCP. The following quoted post explains it better:

* 1 allows uTorrent to attempt outgoing TCP connections
* 2 allows uTorrent to attempt outgoing uTP connections
* 4 allows uTorrent to accept incoming TCP connections
* 8 allows uTorrent to accept incoming uTP connections
* 16 tells uTorrent to use the new uTP header. This is an improved communication header, but is not backwards compatible with clients that do not understand it.

Basically, these values can be added together in order to enable the options. Examples of bt.transp_disposition values combinations:

* 31 (16 + 8 + 4 + 2 + 1) = enables all the options above
* 15 (1 + 2 + 4 + 8) = uTorrent will attempt both TCP and uTP for outgoing connections, and accepts TCP and uTP incoming connections
* 10 (2 + 8) = uTorrent will only attempt to create uTP outgoing connections and only accepts uTP incoming connection
* 5 (1 + 4) = uTorrent will only use TCP for outgoing connections and when accepting incoming conncetions

One caveat, they said that this works best with only one connection at a time. I tried downloading two things at the same time and after a couple minutes the overall speed dropped to about 30, so, yeah, serialize your downloads.

I've been lucky with uTorrent. I've been able to get pretty high speeds. If a torrent has a lot of seeds, I can typically pull 'em down at 2MB/s. Yes, MB.

shabbs wrote:I've been lucky with uTorrent. I've been able to get pretty high speeds. If a torrent has a lot of seeds, I can typically pull 'em down at 2MB/s. Yes, MB.

You're with Rogers? 2 mega-*Bytes*? You must have a 25 Mbps access and are close to maxing it out with the overhead. My guess is they are not throttling in your area. Lucky b-word.

wprager wrote:

shabbs wrote:I've been lucky with uTorrent. I've been able to get pretty high speeds. If a torrent has a lot of seeds, I can typically pull 'em down at 2MB/s. Yes, MB.

You're with Rogers? 2 mega-*Bytes*? You must have a 25 Mbps access and are close to maxing it out with the overhead. My guess is they are not throttling in your area. Lucky b-word.

I've got the 24/1 rate but regularly exceed those rates.

And yes, mega-BYTES. As in... a 16Mbps torrent download.