Rogers Hi-Speed Internet

Rogers Hi-Speed Internet

Rogers Yahoo! Hi-Speed Internet logo
Type	Subsidiary of Rogers Communications
Headquarters	Toronto, Canada
Industry	Internet Service Provider
Products	Cable Modem, DSL, Email
Owner(s)	Rogers Communications
Website	www.rogers.com/internet

Rogers Hi-Speed Internet is a broadband internet service provider in Canada, owned by Rogers Communications. Rogers previously operated under the brand names Rogers@Home, Rogers Yahoo! Hi-Speed Internet, and Road Runner in Newfoundland.

Relationship with Yahoo!

In 2004, Rogers partnered with Yahoo! to offer Rogers Yahoo! Hi-Speed Internet to its members. The free service offers unlimited e-mail storage, plus access to Premium Yahoo! Services at no charge, including a Flickr PRO account. Customers with websites previously hosted by Rogers were offered the option of transferring to ca.geocities.com addresses. (Unike regular GeoCities websites, these were ad-free for existing accounts, although those for new customers had drop-down ads.) All such websites were discontinued with the closure of GeoCities on 27 October 2009. Although still partnered with Yahoo!, Rogers dropped Yahoo! from its services name in 2008.

In mid-2009, Rogers discontinued giving free Flickr Pro accounts to all Rogers customers and switched all accounts to the free version while allowing old pictures and videos to be stored even though it was over the allowed limit.

Product changes

Speed

On March 18, 2009 Rogers started to increase speeds for its Ultra-Lite and Extreme customers to 512 kbit/s download for Ultra-Lite, and 10.0 Mbit/s download and 1.0 Mbit/s upload for Extreme.

Transfer limits

Rogers has been reducing monthly data transfer limits for their lower-tier services. The Ultra-Lite package has gone from a 60 GB limit to a 2 GB limit and Lite package has gone from a 60 GB limit to a 25 GB.

Rogers Yahoo! Hi-Speed Internet users are now sometimes being warned through their browser via Rogers-injected code that they have reached 75% of their limit and again at 100% of their limit and will be charged for additional usage at the time of the 100% warning. If the limit is exceeded, the customer will be subject to additional charges. The overcharge fees are charged on a per-gigabyte basis (rounded up) at a high rate for cheaper plans, and a lower rate per additional overdraft gigabyte for the more expensive plans. The Portable Internet bandwidth cap is not enforced.

Service	Download speed	Upload speed	Monthly bandwidth limits
Ultra-Lite	500 kbit/s	256 kbit/s	2 GB
Lite	3.0 Mbit/s	256 kbit/s	25 GB
Express	10.0 Mbit/s	512 Kbit/s	60 GB
Extreme	10.0 Mbit/s	1.0 Mbit/s	95 GB
Extreme Plus	25.0 Mbit/s	1.0 Mbit/s	125 GB
Ultimate	50.0 Mbit/s	2.0 Mbit/s	175 GB
Portable Internet	2.0 Mbits/s	256 Kbits/s	30 GB

Security

While previously offering Norton Internet Security, Rogers and Yahoo switched to offering Rogers Online Protection. It contains anti-virus/spyware, parent/privacy control and firewall features. A cutoff time of June 30, 2009 was set for people to switch from their previous protections to this new one.

Controversy

Rogers has been criticised for traffic redirection and inspection. They use deep packet inspection to identify and throttle BitTorrent traffic. and use website address errors (failed DNS lookups) to redirect traffic to their search portal. They have also made a controversial move to display advertisements in webmail even though users pay for the service.

Project Cleanfeed

Internet service providers Bell, Bell Aliant, MTS Allstream, Rogers, Shaw, SaskTel, Telus, and Vidéotron announced "Project Cleanfeed Canada" in November 2006; this involves the blocking of access to a blacklist of sites suspected to contain child pornography. The blacklist is compiled from reports by Internet users and investigated by the independent organization Cybertip.ca.

Throttling

BitTorrent traffic is restricted through bandwidth throttling, which has caused complaints as users feel Rogers is overstepping their bounds as a service provider and despite Rogers advertising their service “for sharing large files and much more”. Rogers has previously denied such allegations, despite widespread reports of the issue. Further controversy arose when in May 2007, Rogers began throttling all encrypted file transfers allegedly to combat BitTorrent traffic, but affecting all encrypted transfers regardless if they are BitTorrent traffic or not.

Injection of content

File:Using-rogers.png

Rogers injects a warning message into Google.com

Since early December, 2007, Rogers has been injecting their own content into other companies' websites without permission. Rogers users who are close to the maximum download limit are seeing red text appear above the content of every website they visit. The notice continues to appear on every page until the user either clicks a link acknowledging that they have seen the message or chooses to opt out of the notification.

Hijacking failed DNS lookups

In late July, 2008, all "server not found" pages are redirected to a webpage with Rogers advertisements, those similar to the page the user was trying to access. Those who decide to "opt-out" are still redirected to an Internet Explorer "server not found" page, regardless of the user's web browser.

External links

• Rogers Hi-Speed Internet