Thursday, January 13, 2011

Rogers High Speed Extreme Plus – Make sure you have the right service …

I have had trouble with my Internet service off and on forever. This is a common complaint so I don’t put too much stock in it, but today I popped in to look at my service for a few minutes and noticed that my bandwidth cap was still wrong, as it has been for a year or so …

To rewind a moment, I moved to the Extreme Plus service some time ago and that comes with a jump from 10mbps to 25 and a bandwidth cap increase from 95GB per month to 125GB.

Since they did not have the real service deployed to Ottawa yet, I was grandfathered into the 18mbps extreme plus that had been selling for a while to that point. It was a bit of a hack on the old Docsys 2 modem, and the new one requires a new Docsys 3 modem. So I waited.

A few months ago, Rogers gave me a new modem, although not without immense pain as it was almost impossible to actually get the modem since not one person in their support network was trained on how to do that. It eventually happened though, and I moved up to the higher speed. Except I never really saw the super fast downloads and the bandwidth cap never changed to 125GB. Peculiar.

Ok … forward again to today. I called them up and complained the my cap was wrong and in fact did not match any of their plans. They have dropped the cap on extreme service from 95GB to 80GB, proving that “not so extreme” is the new “extreme” … sheesh. I suspect that Extreme subscribers are not extremely pleased with that move.

Anyway … I called today to straighten this mess out and it took only a moment for her to come back with, you must have been grandfathered in. I confirmed that and said that Rogers had since given me the appropriate Docsys 3 modem (very good of them by the way) and was expecting to get everything I had been paying for all along (they had charged me for Extreme Plus service from the beginning, yet given me substandard bandwidth caps – another move that can please no one.)

She said that the feature was still listed under the wrong code … indicating I was still on the grandfathered service. Hmmm … I wonder … how long does one have to pay for a service before the service is actually hooked up.

She told me she would change it, put me on hold for a moment, and the line went dead. Of course, I was on Skype at the time and she had interrupted my Internet to reset the code. It came back right away though, and I got an email from Rogers a while later confirming my upgrade from Extreme Plus to Extreme Plus :-\

I checked the “My Rogers” page and sure enough, my cap had been set correctly.

This evening I checked my bandwidth, and both my download and upload speeds are consistently higher … kind of proving that I’ve been getting a little screwed for a long time :-)

Anyway … wicked latency to Ottawa to Toronto and wicked upload speeds everywhere. The only weak download speed was to Rochester NY … I’ll live …

Yup … I’m pretty pleased. That’s just about exactly what I pay for. Now if we could only get Swedish or Japanese speeds in this country … of course, I can always pay the $99 to get 50mbps down and 2mbps up …

Lesson learned: If you feel the Rogers has screwed something up … they probably have. Their computer system is one of the most complex I have ever seen. Call them up and make sure.

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