The IT Nerd

When I last spoke about the fact that my Rogers gigabit Internet connection has been half that speed for the last week and a half, and it appeared that this issue was bigger than just me, I was trying to work up the courage to phone Rogers. The reason being that phoning them tends to be very frustrating. Thus it requires courage to pick up the phone and call them.

I’m not there yet.

But my wife and I did start looking at the competition. Namely Bell. Now if we were going to switch telcos, we’d switch everything. TV, home phone, Internet. So we started to look at Bell Bundles for all of those services. This is what we saw:

Hmmmm…. No bundles with gigabit Internet. No problem, they have a build your own bundle tab. So we walked through it and configured a Bell Bundle that matched what we’re getting from Rogers. Here’s the price:

Now we were paying about that with Rogers until the last time we had a problem with our gigabit Internet service where Rogers cut the price down to $155 a month to retain us as customers. Thus this price wasn’t a shock to us.

Another option is to just get Internet from Bell and keep or TV and home phone service with Rogers. At least for now. Here’s what they’re serving up for gigabit Internet service:

Well, $99 a month is not a bad price. So you’re likely wondering why we didn’t pull the trigger. Two things. The first being this:

Bell discounts their services for a period of time to get you in the door. Then the price goes up. We’re not fans of that. A company should just give you their best price all the time without playing games like this. The second reason why we didn’t pull the trigger is that Bell was caught using extremely high pressure sales tactics on every call. And this was coming from current and former Bell call center employees. Of course Bell denied this, but the scale of customers who were reporting the same thing made it clear that Bell has a serious problem. And we’ve experienced a version of this before we dumped Bell several years back. This is giving us a reason to question if we should go back to them.

So the bottom line is that we’re continuing to look at options while working up the courage to call Rogers and see if they can fix this issue, which we wonder if they can seeing as this is the third time we’ve had speed issues with them.

One last thing. If reps from Rogers and Bell are reading this, you’re free to reach out and convince us why you’re the choice to go with as we’re open to hear what you have to say. If you can show that you can provide consistent speed and great customer service, we’ll sign on instantly. Because all we want are services that deliver what is promised at a reasonable price with great customer serivce. No more, no less.

UPDATE: Just after 5PM today, I got a call from The Office Of The President at Rogers. Clearly my posts got their attention. I had a quick but productive conversation with them and they noted that a couple of my downstream channels were out of spec. Whether this could be responsible for what I am seeing, he wasn’t sure. In any case, a tech was going to come out on Tuesday afternoon. But what he said about my channels being out of spec sparked my interest. So I put my IT Nerd hat on and logged into my modem. This is what I saw:

Generally speaking the signal strength for down stream channels should be between – 10 dBmV to + 10 dBmV. Ideally at 0dBmV. What I notice is that the signal strength for channels 29 and 30 (look under the Channel ID column) are just outside the upper limit of that spec. In terms of the signal noise ratio, it should be in the 36~40 dB range. I notice that a lot of my channels are just outside the upper limit of that spec. But neither of those should cause the sort of issues that I am seeing. The reason why I am pointing this out is that in previous go rounds with this issue, I could find clear and convincing evidence that something was up with Roger’s network. I’m not seeing that here. This merits further investigation as there’s something weird going on here and I am not 100% sure that this is a Rogers issue. Thus my weekend is going to be spent really digging into this to fully understand what is going on here.

UPDATE #2: Last night I spent a couple of hours digging into this and I couldn’t come up with a reason why this was happening. But I could see that there was a problem. That was highly frustrating. Thus I decided to park my troubleshooting and pick it up the next day.

Today at 7AM I did another speed test and to my surprise my speeds are back to normal. With normal being something north of 930 Mbps downstream at the Rogers modem. I thought that was weird because things just don’t fix themselves. So I logged into the Rogers modem to see what was going on. This is what I saw:

If you look at my signal strength, every channel except channel 30 is within spec. That was different than the picture of this same screen that I took yesterday. That was weird. It was about that time that I heard the sound of a truck backing up. I took the liberty of going out to the balcony to take a look outside and I saw two moving trucks. That made me wonder if the cause of the issue was one of the people who was moving out today. You see Rogers Internet is a closed loop system. What that means is if someone has a bad piece of equipment like a cable splitter on their connection, it could affect other people. Thus using that logic, it is plausible that one of the people who moved out today had something bad on their cable connection and I was collateral damage in terms of whatever havoc it was creating. And the second they disconnected the problematic piece of equipment, things returned to normal. Either that or something else that’s customer facing changed inside the Rogers infrastructure that I am connected to that accounts for this. Another data point is that it is unlikely that Rogers had the time or the ability to send someone out to the condo development overnight to look at any of their equipment on the property. Especially on a long weekend.

I’ve reported all of this to the person at the Office Of The President that I was talking to and suggested that instead of sending a tech out to visit me, that tech might want to poke around the equipment outside to see if something is up. In the meantime, I will continue to monitor this to see if this is just a fluke or if all is good going forward.

This entry was posted on December 29, 2017 at 8:54 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Bell, Rogers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.