nh.mohamed@rogers.com; gh.mcphail@rogers.com; dwatt@rogers.com; gknowles@rogers.com; abrock@rogers.com; rmckerlie@rogers.com; dperry@rogers.com; hcampbell@rogers.com; jinnes@rogers.com; dburt@rogers.com; mdaly@rogers.com; cmacdonald@rogers.com; pmoser@rogers.com; bterdeman@rogers.com; tviner@rogers.com; choffman@rogers.com; plnd@rogers.com; dmiller@rogers.com


I am sending this email in an attempt to find a solution to the various problems plaguing the Rogers network. Please understand that I am not an average computer user. I have thoroughly performed a variety of troubleshooting issues myself before I contact Rogers. I do this because I wanted to be sure that I knew what the issue was so that I could properly relate it to a Rogers agent, who I trusted would not only understand my problem but be able to work with me towards a solution to the problems. During my many interactions with Rogers agents, I have become increasingly frustrated at their inability to understand and address my issues. I am also extremely frustrated by their insistence that Rogers is not at fault for these issues, which I have given them evidence to prove that it is, in fact, a Rogers issue. Instead, when I speak with a tech agent all I'm told  is that my equipment is at fault. I will admit that my equipment is not immune to issues but I do however, know how to research thoroughly to find a reason for the problem. I can choose from any one of my seven devices to connect directly to the modem and to test the problem. I have even had multiple routing devices, as well as tested the problems while a computer was directly connected to the modem. There are many resources online in which people using the Rogers service have also been experiencing the same problems as myself. Despite all of this, Rogers employees still refuse to acknowledge anything is wrong.

	I have been using Rogers Internet for the four to five years that I have been living in and around London. In those four to five years the only problem I've had was at my apartment on Commissioners RD in London with a loose wire in my apartment. It has not been until I moved into my current location that I have experienced continuous problems with Rogers and had to endure the technician’s inability and unwillingness to assist me with my problems. Problems that they refused, even when presented with proof, to admit, or believe that Rogers was responsible for these issues.

	I noticed something was wrong almost from the beginning of the connection of our service. Initially I thought it was the Netgear wireless router that we use. To try and correct the problem, I set up a computer with Windows 7 to use ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) with a network switch within the first couple of months of moving into this house. ICS was not the best choice, but it was only meant to be a temporary fix until something more suitable could be found. This unfortunately was not the solution to the problem.

	I continued to try and narrow down the issue myself by troubleshooting methods after Rogers Live Chat Technicians proved to be ineffectual in helping me with my problem.  Through my troubleshooting methods I found that the problem stemmed from a signal issue. After I successfully gathered some information from the Live Chat Agent about acceptable signal levels (whom just copied their info from their online help website but couldn't actually tell me what any of it meant), I found some resources online that explained what they meant. Prior to any research I have done I knew about the modems internal IP address of 192.168.100.1, which could be accessed through various statics about the modem. I found that the signal levels were acceptable, but the signal would just drop all together on occasion. If I tried to power cycle the modem or reconnect the COAX cable (even connecting it directly to the line coming into the house), the modem would take anywhere from thirty minutes to a few hours to reconnect. I then contacted Live Chat once again and requested my drop be replaced, as my previous conversations with Live Chat and tickets have revealed that “there were not any problems with the Rogers network in my area”. I continued to insist that this problem be addressed and after two tech visits, a “Senior Tech” came out and replaced the drop. He had found that despite the drop only physically being at the most fifty feet long, it was registering as being more than 150 feet long. Although this did not seem to resolve the issue immediately, after a few days the signal did eventually stop dropping. I am still betting the issue was caused by the winter temperatures.

	It was after the drop issue had been resolved that I encountered yet another problem. Again through ineffectual live chats and tickets my problem failed to be addressed adequately. It was through my own troubleshooting that I uncovered a packet loss issue. After I did some testing and read some messages on a technical board dedicated to the Rogers Service (DSLreports.com), it was found that this issue was not just isolated to my specific connection. Instead, it was an issue with a specific phub gw03.lndn.phub.net.cable.rogers.com [66.185.90.65]). This phub was not correctly routing HTTP traffic. Other types of traffic worked fine (HTTPS for example), but websites using the normal HTTP protocol were often loading extremely slow, if at all. Every time I insisted that there was an issue with a specific router on the Rogers Network, even linking the thread on the DSLreports.com website, Live chat agents refused to acknowledge the problem as being an actual issue. Every ticket that I submitted was returned with “No Problem Found”. This issue, a problem that affected the service that customers pay for, was ignored for an entire month before someone at Rogers was able to both realize and correct the problem. This again brings up my questionable abilities of the people Rogers employs to assist their paying customers with technical issues.

	These issues have left me feeling that the current technical support offered by Rogers is unable to actually handle any issues beyond basic connectivity issues contained in their binders. At this time I have gone through about eleven live chat conversations, a series of phone conversation, a number of tickets submitted, three field tech visits, and three modem replacements. Not once has anyone from Rogers provided me with a solution to any problem.

	Both my household and I were fed up with the extremely poor support we were receiving from Rogers we decided that it may be time to switch Internet providers. This was a hard decision for the household because both my sister (Brandilee Earle whose name the account is under) and I have been with Rogers for a number of years without any extensive problems. We began to look for different providers and had found other options. When Brandilee contacted retention to notify them of our desire to cancel not only due to the technical issues we had been having, but also the increase of the monthly overage charge for bandwith to fifty dollars from twenty five. The retention agent that was contacted was able to give us twenty five dollars off our bill for a year as well requesting that someone assist us with our issues. We reluctantly agreed to these terms.

	I regret agreeing to these terms and wish that I had made the decision to try another internet service provider. For the following months after this agreement there were small blips in the service. The modem would occasionally stop routing for a minute or two at a time; minor annoyances, but still annoyances. Conversations again with Live Chat failed as usual to address any problem as they insisted, again, that Rogers was not at fault for any of these issues.

	It was in the middle of September that another problem was encountered. I first noticed this problem when trying to play the new game Starcraft 2. The issue was that I would briefly get disconnected from the Battle.Net service. With another game that I play, World of Warcraft, my service would get disconnected entirely. Upon encountering these issues I was left with no other choice but to contact Rogers to try and get my problems addressed. When I did use the Live Chat to voice my concerns about this issue I was informed, again, that Rogers network was fine and that it was not a problem on their end and was asked to traceroute to the server in question. I provided the traceroute, which was not showing any abnormal behaviour and was informed that the “issue” was happening on ATT’s network and so Rogers would be unable to do anything to fix the issue. I went on to explain the jump to 100ms on a certain hop half way between myself and the server was normal and the issue was not lag, but dropped connections from Rogers. The agent I spoke with disagreed, still adamant that 100ms ping was the cause of the issue. I then explained to the agent that I have had multiple issues with the Rogers network in the past that were not apparent in any form, and the agent reluctantly submitted an escalation. The agent I was speaking with informed me that the engineering team would most likely conclude that the issue did not exist.

	The following day, I went through the process of troubleshooting the issue myself. I have a wireless card in my PC so I decided to connect to my neighbour’s network (a Bell network that my household has been given permission to use due to the instability of our Rogers connection) and see if the problem still existed. When I played my games I did not encounter the same problem as I had while connected to my Rogers account. Upon reconnecting to my Rogers connection, I immediately started having the same issues as before. When I contacted Rogers again I was informed that there were no problems found.

	At this time, I also noticed that BitTorrent downloads were not going as fast as they normally do. The speed graph indicated it never went higher than 4mbps. I consulted the forums at DSLreports.com and found that I was not the only person having this issue. Other people, all over Ontario and New Brunswick had found that Rogers had implemented something that prevented torrents from obtaining the maximum speed their lines were provisioned for.

	I frequently encountered Rogers agents stating that my router was the culprit, despite explaining to them that the problem still occured while the router was not in use. Due to this, I constructed an entirely new router myself knowing that routers are often troublesome due to lack of memory. To alleviate any connection problems that it may have, I also added a four port switch that that handles all local traffic. In adding this switch it allowed for the router to be designated specifically to handling internet traffic. Upon the completion of my new router I was hoping that this would fix the issues that I had been having previously. Unfortunately my efforts were in vain as the problems still persisted even with the new router in operation. Battle.net, as well as other services such as Remote Desktop software and all my torrents were running extremely slow.

	It is speculated that Rogers has upgraded, or implemented some new hardware or software that is far more aggressive than needed. Rather than dropping packets originating from P2P traffic, the only traffic the network disregards is HTTP, VOIP and VPN. Running torrents through a VPN connection effectively eliminates the issue, but is not a solution that customers should have to resort to. Despite many Rogers Agents being aware of the thread on DSLreports.com, all of them refuse to believe any problem exists. The only conformation of any changes on the Rogers network has come from Keith McArthur on Twitter stating that: "The investigation is still ongoing but here's what I've been able to find out. Rogers recently made some upgrades to our network management systems that had the unintended effect of shaping non-p2p file sharing traffic under a specific combination of conditions. We will be rolling back this upgrade until we can resolve these issues, but the rollback will take a few days. Meantime, we're continuing to look into some of the other issues that have been raised”. This comment was made in the middle of October, and the changes are still in effect. Connections are still being reset which is still affecting unrelated traffic.

	While this problem still occurs, a new, similar problem has popped up on November 3rd. Many games (World of Warcraft, Starcraft 2, Guild Wars, and many more) get disconnected quite frequently. While many (Both customers and Rogers techs) believe this is a problem caused by running p2p software on customers home networks, the problem still exists despite the lack of any other internet connected program running. Despite calling in nearly everyday to address this issue and Rogers employees assuring me this issue is being looked into, not a single escallation has been made. The agents I've spoken to have just created incident reports regarding my contacting them. On top of this, the Rogers Management Office has blatently lied to me. After contacting them due to regular Rogers techs being unable to assist with any of my problems, I was told that Keith McArthur worked both as the head of the Public Relations department AND the Network Department. As you should very well know, Keith McArthur is strickly part of the Public Relations team and has nothing to do with the engineering team. The same Management Office employee that is claiming to be investigating my issue has failed to even contact the correct deparment and refuses to listen to me about it.

	It's sickening to know that despite the fact that my household pays over $1000 a year on internet alone and the company offering a product that their customers are paying money for is unwilling to give them quality service or even assist with obvious problems on the network. The issues that I have brought up in this letter have been researched by myself as well as many other people. I am extremely frustrated by Rogers inability to accept that there is a problem on their end and that it should be fixed. Paying customers deserve to have a product that works and when it is broken it should be fixed without having to fight through red tape and ineffectual staff. I am hoping that what I have had to say in this letter will be addressed and given the repair that is needed.