Lack of speed from Rogers Hi-Speed

Dear Rogers Hi-Speed,

The reason we are writing this petition is to express our extreme dissatisfaction and disappointment with your handling of the Rogers Hi-Speed Cable Internet service. Your service is rated at a 1.5Mbps (approximately 150kb/s) download speed and 192Kbps (approximately 20kb/s) upload speed. This has been falsely advertised in our opinion.

According to your tech support staff, the problem isn't with your service, they insist that it lies within the websites and servers that we (the Rogers Hi-Speed customers) are trying to access. However this is simply untrue in every form. It happens to be that every single website including your own Rogers owned and operated websites are not loading at the advertised speed, nor are they allowing us (the Rogers Hi-Speed customers) to download at the advertised speed. Download speeds are less than 1/4 of the speed advertised, without the help of download accelerators. Even with download accelerators we cannot achieve your advertised speeds. However with other ISPs such as Bell High Speed Edition (HSE), for the most part, users can achieve their advertised speeds (about 960Kbps for Bell HSE) on the same websites and servers that us (the Rogers Hi-Speed customers) cannot even achieve 400Kbps on. This is very disappointing, and nothing is being done to fix this.

This problem is not just a specific issue to one city or home. It appears to be happening throughout most of Ontario. I (Ryan Ewen, a Rogers Hi-Speed customer) have heard from multiple people within and around my location, including Beeton, Alliston, Oshawa, and the GTA, who are experiencing almost the exact same disappointing speed ratings as I do. In fact, upon contact with a Rogers Hi-Speed tech support email representative I was asked to ping and trace http://www.squigly.com. That particular website has a speed test right on it. Using the tests there I achieved poor results ranging from 54Kbps to 500Kbps. I couldn't even achieve half of the advertised speed of 1500Kbps. Similar tests on http://www.broadbandreports.com show even more disappointing results. Results from that website are on average 300Kbps. Thats not even 1/4 of the advertised speed of Rogers Hi-Speed.

It is not just these tests that are giving disappointing results. We have been getting download speeds of on average 30kb/s from websites such as http://www.download.com and many other places. However users of Bell HSE can achieve 90kb/s on that very same website, downloading the very same file, at the very same time. How can this be if you claim that it is the website that is slow and not your service? Truly Bell cannot be cheating somehow to get their advertised speeds. Your tech support even claims that the poor results on http://www.broadbandreports.com are specific only to that website, but in fact Shaw Cable advertises that very same website and their average speed results on public TV commercials. How can Shaw (in addition to Bell) achieve their advertised speeds (which are not very different than that of Rogers Hi-Speed) on http://www.broadbandreports.com if (as your tech support claims) the problem is limited to that and other particular websites? The fact is that it is not that particular website, nor is it every other website on the internet, as Rogers Tech-Support seem to give the impression. There are many exceptions where a website or server will be slower than normal (when compared to the advertised speeds), but Rogers Hi-Speed customers are experiencing these symptoms on almost *every* website. Websites which freely give Bell and Shaw customers much better results.

Some speed tests that we have tried and that *proove* that there is a problem with our speed, when compared to the Rogers advertised speeds and the speeds of users from other ISPs (particularly those of Shaw and Bell HSE), are as follows:

http://www.broadbandreports.com
http://www.download.com
http://www.2wire.com
http://www.squigly.com (thanks Rogers tech support for adding this one to the list)

What we (the Rogers Hi-Speed customers) want is an increase in achievable download/upload speed, in order to reach the advertised speed of Rogers Hi-Speed, or a price cut for the Rogers Hi-Speed internet service. The expected speed increase is 4 times that of the average current results from the above listed speed test sites. The average results are about 300Kbps (approximately 30kb/s) down, and 90Kbps (approximately 9kb/s) up. The expected price cut is at least 50\% less than the current price.

Whichever root you seek to take as a responsible company should be decided by the comments of the petitioners here. We will not rest until we achieve our goals.