Rogers' infrastructure still sucks after all these years

June 22, 2009 geek | tech | Internet

I’ve had the displeasure of using Rogers cable Internet at two different places I’ve been staying recently – one in Guelph, and one in Breslau.

I remember back in the day (2003-ish, the last time I had Rogers myself) I had occasional, but persistent problems with one major thing – any time I had a large outgoing transfer happening, all of my incoming transfers went slow and flaky.

For instance, my telnet connections will stay connected for hours – until I send a big (10-15MB) upload through via FTP. Then it drops the connection.

Or if I do a big Subversion commit, all of the sudden all my DNS lookups start failing. This is something I remember from years and years ago, that they still apparently haven’t fixed.

For the longest time, I thought this was just a problem with cable modem technology, so I bought Bell DSL and was reasonably satisfied (until they started capping and throttling, that is).

However, when I was in Texas, I had Time Warner cable Internet and I have to say that it was excellent! The speed was better than Bell’s DSL, and I never had trouble with simultaneous incoming/outgoing transfers.

As far as I know, the underlying technology is nearly the same – which leads me to believe that Rogers’ problems are just incompetance, or more likely, laziness. With the lack of competition in Canada, people only have a choice between crap, or crappier.

By the way, I love how this site: http://www.ihaterogers.ca/ shows up on the first Google results page for the search “Rogers”.