[PFD]

This from the Barrie Examiner. He doesnt' provide real proof other than "unnamed friends" and doesn't mention the software he uses. It's pretty shoddy journalism, really...but suggests that Rogers is exaggerating how much bandwith you use.

EDIT: Actually it's shoddy journalism because it's a letter to the editor. He makes some sweeping claims, so take with a grain of salt.

http://www.thebarrieexaminer.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=2907727

 

[bdoyledimou]

Sounds like someone has an open wifi connection and is providing their neighbors with hours and hours of entertainment.

I

 

[hugh]

The big cable companies and telco`s would be crucified by the CRTC if it were discovered the the bandwidth calculators were inaccurate. I`m certain they are accurate plus or minus a very small percentage.

If I am wrong, I suspect that in the coming year (prompted by the recent UBB decision and lower bandwidth caps from the big cable companies) that many tech savvy users will be independently auditing their cable or telco and discover any discrepancies.

As noted by previous poster, my suspicion is an open Wi-Fi connection or something similar.

 

[blueroomelectro]

The Barrie guy should invest in a router that tracks bandwidth. Plus he doesn't have any real idea what his bandwidth usage is.

They claim the problem is our usage habits like downloading movies, and too many PDFs. You name it, they blame it on us. Problem is, we do none of that, aside from a couple online gaming accounts, which use insignificant bandwidth except for the odd upgrade patch.

Even still, we had more people using online gaming prior to August, than we did after, yet somehow we're using 400%+ more bandwidth.

Who's "us" and who are these more people? Meh.

 

[99gecko]

^^^
I suspect "us" = family, and "more people" (prior to August) means someone (a gamer) has moved out of the house, or similar.

I agree that it could be an open WiFi connection, and with a family of seven that is very likely. On a recent trip to Ottawa, I was showing a friend all the WiFi connections in his neighbourhood. As an experiment, I tried to connect to three of them. One had "password" as it's password, and the other two used the network name (SSID) as the password: ie. Bell1 was also the password

It is also possible that that their cable modem has been cloned. Rogers apparently uses BPI+ certificates but also apparently there are hackers out that can somehow defeat this.

 

[grog]

It could also simply be someone within his own house. It's not exactly a stretch to think his kids haven't been completely honest when asked if they have been doing a lot of downloading, nor would I put it past them to temporarily disable the bandwidth monitor he installed to try and cover their tracks.

 

[fastlayne]

Bell and Rogers, et al, don't seem to think their subscribers are due the information to determine if internet overage charges are valid. I would expect IP addresses, time of day, and byte counts.

If my phone bill came in with $80 in long distance charges, I would quickly review the numbers, times and durations of the calls.

Bell and Rogers are going down a slippery slope with egregious overage rates. $3, $4, $5/GB are absurd and will force the CRTC to regulate
ISPs and then the gravy train will end.

 

[NeilN]

Rogers provides byte counts per day. Expecting them to keep IP addresses, the time of day the IP addresses were visited and the byte count per IP address would result in huge log files. You can't seriously compare a phone bill to an Internet usage log.

 

[pvj]

Well,I found this rather interesting.Got the 75% usage reached email this morning so I went online and checked.We were 219 GB over with over 275GB downloaded on the 18th of January 2 days previous.Funny,the internet had a problem that afternoon and was out for 3-4 hours.I had called Rogers tech support and during his tests was told that my modem and 1 of my neighbours was dropping packets.A tech was scheduled to come out the next morning but later that same day the internet starting working again.I called back and cancelled the tech visit as I don't like wasting the techs time when all is working.
The same day that this huge downloading occured.We have never gone over the 95GB usage before,closest was 89 Gb in December when the kids were home more from school and downloaded a couple of games.Makes me wonder what happened this day so I have had Rogers network team open up a ticket to see what they can find out.The phone support guy was very quick to credit my account with the overage charges without me putting up any kind of arguement.

Personnaly I would find it hard to imagine that 275GB could be downloaded in 1 day(or 20 hours since we were down 3-4 hours)

 

[hugh]

pvj, I would not read anything conspiratorial into this. I mean stuff happens. They opened a ticket and credited your account.

If they get back to you, please let us know what they say.

What bothers me about your post was the you got the 75% usage after you were already 219GB over or am I reading that incorrectly?

 

[MarcP]

I've always been annoyed by the measurement of traffic because there are no standards and nobody watching the fox guarding the hen house. We all have to trust Bell and that didn't go well with the do-not-call list so I have a hard time trusting a report that can't be verified, can't be disputed, and is final.

So what is measured exactly? Just the TCP data or the IP overhead as well? What is my protection against unsolicited incoming traffic? I bet none... Will a DOS flood against my IP be counted toward the cap? If so, why are we automatically accusing someone complaining of having an open Wifi? We are not allowed to question how this is done?

 

[pvj]

I'm not reading anything into it ,I just found it very strange/interesting that this occured the day I had a problem with the internet being down for a few hours.

Yes you read it right,this massive usage was Tuesday and today Thursday morning I had the screen up saying I had reached 75%.That's when I went into the usage page on Rogers and checked. It was well past the 100% at this point.
I'll be interested to see what they come up with and report back.

 

[hugh]

My guess is their reporting systems are a day behind. So End of Day Tuesday gets processed on Wednesday and email sent out on Thursday.

Sad that they can't have real time reporting for something they are charging extra for!

 

[bdoyledimou]

My Internet rolls over on teh 28th of the month.

Last night at 6:30 PM i got the rogers pop up that I had hit 75% of my usage. I thought that was odd, and checked online usage report and it showed 0 GBs used .. (it had refreshed).

Today I check it and it has somehow registered 20 GB of usage for yesterday alone. ALL of it downstream.

This is a complete anomaly to my usage, and considering i wasn't doing anything major yesterday, very surprising.

Calling Rogers was no help as apparently they have no idea what the bandwidth is used for? just that it happened.

How can they prove it happened? They cannot.. I have to prove it didn't.

 

[Neild]

I went through headaches with the cable company a few years ago.

I noticed their metering didn't seem to match my usage.

The first few people I talked to went back to their techs who scoffed at anyone who would questioning the system, so they brushed me off.

Of course when I followed up, they were dismissive and rude. Eventually the matter got escalated to the programmer and the technical manager. They too were dismissive and gave condescending and irrelevant lectures about how a kilobyte is actually 1024 bytes, not 1000.

The programmer himself was particularly convinced there could be no errors in his code.

After some patience though, someone else in the department let me know that because of the concerns raised, they found out that his program was in fact, flawed. It was doing something along the lines of treating GB, MB, and KB usage as the same unit.

But even after that was fixed, the problems continued.

The technical management again was blindly convinced that since the program was now 'fixed', it could not possibly be their fault. I received annoying lectures about how my computer probably had some virus or worm that was generating traffic that I wasn't aware of.

There weren't financial overcharges at the time, just annoying messages and throttling.

Eventually one of the non-technical managers started to believe me. So we worked out an arrangement where I would send daily usage estimates to her and I would also disconnect data from the modem whenever going out of town.

Sure enough, the billing system would report huge usage even on days the modem was disconnected. And on days that I estimated high usage, sometimes the readings were near zero.

She got the same condescending treatment from her tech department but pushed it further. By that time I had friends and family using their own net meter programs and comparing against their bills and finding all kinds of gaps.

In the end it turns out they had scrambled up customer ID's and metering ID's. In other words, it would mean customer 23444's record could be showing customer 50021's usage.

It was fixed but in the end they said:
- we found and fixed the problem, what's the big deal
- we don't charge for the extra usage, so what's your problem
- it wasn't the programmer's fault, it was a scrambled database, so we were right after all

So in the end, no real lessons were learned.