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Canon_Man
join:2005-05-25
Niagara Falls, ON

2 edits

Canon_Man

Member

[INTERNET] Bandwidth Overstated after addition of Cogeco Phone

Until September we only had Cogeco for cable and Internet (Turbo 14). Bandwidth was fine until we added the Home Phone Service.

Right after Cogeco Home Phone was installed our bandwidth shot up by over 20+Gb each month. We never had an issue staying inside the 80Gb limit until after the phone was installed.

Overview:

We use a Cisco E2500 dual band 2.4 and 5 GHz wireless router, the same one we have used since getting the Cogeco cable and Internet service in 2010.

Originally we had an RCA DCM425 modem, but it was replaced with the Arris TM602G/115 modem when we added Home Phone. Immediately after installing, our bandwidth went way up. (6+ Gb down and 2.5 Gb up daily, or over 100+ Gb at month end; - four months running.

Nothing, and I mean nothing about our LAN or router has changed since then. The E2500 does not broadcast its SSID, we use static IPs in a very narrow range, WPA2 is enabled, the router is locked down with MAC filtering and there are no other features enabled on the router (Guest Access for instance).

We pulled the service. (Even that was a chore as Cogeco couldn't get the termination right and our home phone was still active well beyond the drop dead date, despite the President's office submitting the disconnect order at my request.

We made no changes to the LAN or the router. Connected to the new service where the phone and the Internet are split off before the Connection Hub.

Our usage dropped down to 'normal' or about 2.0 Gb down and about 900 Mb up. We will definitely be well within our bandwidth from now on.

The only difference between these two services appears to be the addition of digital home phone.

Could te Home Phone have possibly been chewing away at our bandwidth, or could the modem have been set up improperly or was it in trouble and creating way too many re-transmissions?

Gone
Premium Member
join:2011-01-24
Fort Erie, ON

Gone

Premium Member

Re: [INTERNET] Bandwidth Overstated after addition of Cogeco Pho

said by Canon_Man:

Nothing, and I mean nothing about our LAN or router has changed since then. The E2500 does not broadcast its SSID, we use static IPs in a very narrow range, the router is locked down with MAC filtering and there are no other features enabled on the router (Guest Access for instance).

You said nothing about encryption. Unless you're using WPA2 encryption on your wireless network, breaking into a router - even with everything else you've done - is fairly easy.

In fact, in the grand scheme, not broadcasting the SSID and using MAC filtering is useless as a wireless security measure.

Furthermore, while unrelated, not broadcasting the SSID is incredibly inconsiderate and annoying to the people in the same area want to do a band survey in to determine what channel to run their WLAN on. It is a major pet peeve of mine, particularly when people try to claim it offers any sort of security at all.

Canon_Man
join:2005-05-25
Niagara Falls, ON

Canon_Man

Member

Updated!

Gone
Premium Member
join:2011-01-24
Fort Erie, ON

Gone

Premium Member

Ah, there ya go.

At this point now, I don't know what to tell you. If you had DD-WRT or Tomato installed on your E2500, you could cross-reference the transfer logs right on the router to see if Cogeco's meter is legitimate or there is an error.

Canon_Man
join:2005-05-25
Niagara Falls, ON

Canon_Man

Member

Heard some things about Tomato that stopped me from installing it. Could do the cross reference except too late now, tossed Cogeco out the door. They were no help and blamed everything but their equipment.

Cogeco_Aaron
Premium Member
join:2011-07-11

Cogeco_Aaron to Canon_Man

Premium Member

to Canon_Man
Sorry to hear we weren't able to get this resolved for you.

Digital Phone usage shouldn't cause any bandwidth usage at all. I apologize I wasn't around to take a look at it for you.

Canon_Man
join:2005-05-25
Niagara Falls, ON

Canon_Man

Member

Aaron,

No offense to you, but I just don't like dealing with a cable and ISP provider that has such an arrogant way of dealing with issues like this.

They blamed us and our equipment, despite the fact that we were always 'invisible' as I mentioned previously and we finally enabled MAC filtering as a last ditch effort. I even isolated our LAN one day for 20 hours from the modem, and we still logged some bandwidth, how we did that I have no idea.

I even suggested that they put a data analyzer on the modem to see what was happening. At one point early on, the President's office mentioned that there could be a possibility of 'cloning' of the MAC address.

Seems to me a network that allows a MAC address to own more than one IP address is a recipe for disaster. Fortunately IP's can't be duplicated without the network software detecting it. That's why other ISP's use IP as the designation.

And there is something else about this that still has me wondering. When they came to install the Arris modem, they brought the ugliest beat up version you could imagine. I asked them to mount it next to the demarcation point on the utility panel for this reason. Instead, the tech walked out to the truck and brought a brand new Arris modem in and mounted it there.

Unfortunately, he forgot to update the information regarding the installation, and for about a week and a half we were running blind because the MAC address never got updated to the one of the new Arris modem in the basement. I called, and they asked me to look at the modem and give them the MAC off of it. Well, there are actually 4 MAC addresses on the Arris modem. I think I made a choice between the EMAC or CMAC addresses.

I'm now wondering if this is part of the problem with the over usage. But no one at Cogeco ever re-verified the installation or the details.

I've never done any discovery to ping the modem or do any of the other things suggested, but I did ask if they could do an end to end test to verify if the data was originating from our modem and terminating in the Cogeco system. They refused.

So it seems that any valid test that could be done to verify the numbers was ignored. They asked me for NetWorx IP tracking data, but never once verified their own numbers.

The numbers I supplied were less than half of the volume they reported on line. Any thinking human being would have stopped to wonder why, not the President's office.

So, I did what any good customer does, I voted with my buck and told them to take the damned equipemnt out of my house. They were shocked, 'You mean you want us to remove it?' Well dah, yes I think I do!

Looking back over our bills I see that we effectively started logging overage in September when the phone service was added and the RCA modem removed. On average, we logged 20+Gb each month, negating any savings we might have realized from bundling our services. When the ISP simply stands there and says, 'Well it's your problem!' I draw the line at that type of stupidity.

I'm happy to report that we are invisible still and that our usage has dropped way off with the new ISP.

For those of you who want to pursue your own litany of errors with Cogeco, you can try emailing Philippe Jette (one of their VP's for residential service) but either he doesn't care, or he simply doesn't read English very well.

email: Philippe.Jette@cogeco.com
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