Now, you can pretty much predict what happened next. Users were outraged. After all you can see from their perspective why they’d be a wee bit ticked off. If everyone is working from home, on VPN connections, doing Zoom calls and the like, upstream bandwidth usage will skyrocket. So if an ISP cuts their upstream bandwidth, users are going to be mad.
The thing is, another user on this thread who goes by the name of “DocDrew” correctly points out that Rogers has policies that allows them to do this. And effectively, you agree to that by signing up to their service. While this is 100% accurate, it hasn’t stopped ticked off Rogers customers from dialing up Bell to switch over to their Internet offering. The original poster of this DSLReports.com thread did. And I have to admit that since this pandemic has started, I have assisted a growing number of my corporate clients to switch from Rogers to Bell so that they can work more effectively from home. And their experience with Bell has been very positive thus far.
I think some of this goes back to my look at Bell’s rollout of the fibre to the home service and coming to the conclusion that Bell had Rogers in a position where Bell would become the dominant Internet provider in Canada. Now while that article was written in 2018, and Bell has tweaked it’s speeds slightly so that it is not symmetrical Internet access, Bell’s offerings are still substantially faster than anything Rogers offers at the moment. And via asking Bell Fibe customers who I have worked with and research in DSLReports.com and in other places, Bell appears to currently has no protocol to throttle customers in a similar way that Rogers does (though I am willing to bet that they could if they wanted to and just like Rogers they have wording in their various agreements that say so). That combined with their recent infrastructure investments makes Bell look like they are far ahead of the curve.
I will be interested to see what Rogers Q2 numbers look like. To be specific, I want to see if Rogers is bleeding Internet customers. I would also like to see if Bell when they put out their Q2 numbers are on the receiving end of those customers. The reason being that it will confirm or deny if my anecdotal observations are accurate or not. My thinking is that this could be the start of mass defections to Bell. But hard numbers would confirm or deny this.
Last week’s “Patch Tuesday” update for Windows 10 has led to a rather serious problem for people who need to print. Which would be a lot of people seeing as a lot of us are working from home these days. The issues appear connected to KB4557957 and KB4560960 for Windows 10 2004 and 1903/1909 respectively. And the bug is that when one of both of these updates are installed, printers attached directly to the computer won’t work. Networked printers however work just fine. Remove the offending updates, and things will work as normal.
A look at Reddit and Microsoft’s forums show that this isn’t isolated to just a few users. Microsoft hasn’t seen fit to admit that this is a problem with these specific updates. But Microsoft has admitted that something has gone off the rails with the way with USB printer ports from version 1903 to the new version 2004 which I told you to avoid if it isn’t being offered to you.
Microsoft really needs to step up here and fix this ASAP as this is clearly affecting a whole lot of people who are remote working at the moment. And it’s yet another black eye on Microsoft who doesn’t seem to have the ability to update their operating system without breaking anything in the process.
Rogers Admits To Throttling Internet Users….. Could This Be The Start Of Mass Defections To Bell?
Posted in Commentary with tags Bell, Rogers on June 15, 2020 by itnerdA thread on DSLReports.com was brought to my attention this morning in regards to Rogers allegedly throttling the upstream connections of Internet users. The claimed smoking gun was in the form of a text chat that was captured by a DSLReports.com user by the name of “squads”:
Now, you can pretty much predict what happened next. Users were outraged. After all you can see from their perspective why they’d be a wee bit ticked off. If everyone is working from home, on VPN connections, doing Zoom calls and the like, upstream bandwidth usage will skyrocket. So if an ISP cuts their upstream bandwidth, users are going to be mad.
The thing is, another user on this thread who goes by the name of “DocDrew” correctly points out that Rogers has policies that allows them to do this. And effectively, you agree to that by signing up to their service. While this is 100% accurate, it hasn’t stopped ticked off Rogers customers from dialing up Bell to switch over to their Internet offering. The original poster of this DSLReports.com thread did. And I have to admit that since this pandemic has started, I have assisted a growing number of my corporate clients to switch from Rogers to Bell so that they can work more effectively from home. And their experience with Bell has been very positive thus far.
I think some of this goes back to my look at Bell’s rollout of the fibre to the home service and coming to the conclusion that Bell had Rogers in a position where Bell would become the dominant Internet provider in Canada. Now while that article was written in 2018, and Bell has tweaked it’s speeds slightly so that it is not symmetrical Internet access, Bell’s offerings are still substantially faster than anything Rogers offers at the moment. And via asking Bell Fibe customers who I have worked with and research in DSLReports.com and in other places, Bell appears to currently has no protocol to throttle customers in a similar way that Rogers does (though I am willing to bet that they could if they wanted to and just like Rogers they have wording in their various agreements that say so). That combined with their recent infrastructure investments makes Bell look like they are far ahead of the curve.
I will be interested to see what Rogers Q2 numbers look like. To be specific, I want to see if Rogers is bleeding Internet customers. I would also like to see if Bell when they put out their Q2 numbers are on the receiving end of those customers. The reason being that it will confirm or deny if my anecdotal observations are accurate or not. My thinking is that this could be the start of mass defections to Bell. But hard numbers would confirm or deny this.
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