Is Rogers Communications Gouging iPhone Users? I guess more to the point are they gouging me? I was feeling a little smug today when my iPhone chimed indicating that I had an SMS message.

I was excited to say the least. You never know who it could be. Maybe my wife had some good news or my sister was looking for some advise on a bluetooth headset. It was a message from Rogers Communications stating that I qualified for a very special deal. So special this deal was that they had immediately activated it on my account.

Rogers svc msg: Pack ur
phone 4 the holidays! ALL
calls made from the US only
$0.99/min. Exclusive offer
already applied on ur account
&urs NOW until May31

I felt quite special and was a little too smug to my friend Dan whose iPhone chimed in about 10 seconds later. “Why is you’re iPhone always so slow with the SMS?” I quipped at him. For some reason his is always behind by a few seconds when we’re on the same SMS list.

Well to my chagrin and Dan’s delight, not only did he receive a similar message, his deal was half of what mine was. Way to kick a guy in his special place!

Not wanting to feel slighted I figured I would call Rogers to see what the explanation was. Not only have I been a Rogers customer for 10 years, it was my boasting about how the iPhone was the next best thing to being Greek that prompted Dan and another guy at work to switch from MTS to Rogers. That iPhone is like an extention of my hand.

My longtime loyalty and good account standing would sway the special US calling rate in my favor, of that I was certain. On top of being a great customer I didn’t go for one of the cheap iPhone plans. I opted instead to simply add the $30 a month 6GB plan onto my existing plan. I actually pay more than Dan monthly.

I placed a call into Rogers’ customer care line and spoke to a very polite person took my call who unfortunately did not know anything about this new promotion. After putting me on hold for a while it sounded like I was getting the worse rate because my account is based on an a-la cart package with a base rate of $10. Forget that I spend gobs of money each month and have almost every feature. I pointed out that I didn’t feel that special considering I spend more than Dan and postulated that Rogers simply feels that they can charge me more.

I’m sad to say there was no silver lining. “Please call again next week when we know about the program. We may be able to do something for you then.” was the only help I received.

I had already figured I was being screwed on the 6GB 3G plan. Yes I have the plan for $30/Month instead of the usual $100/month at the time I signed up for it but I hardly use it at all. Well I use my iPhone all the time but there’s so much free WIFI around that I don’t get to tap into the 3G that much. Even on occasion that I need access to the 3G network the amount of data that is sent with Email and Google maps in minimal.

Since October 2008 I’ve managed to send a whopping 26.9MB and receive a staggering 342 MB of data. I wonder how that cost translates into talk time. The network is digital after all, how much bandwidth is used on voice calls?

I found myself need to download about 30,000 from an Analytics report recently. Anaytics provides some great info but I needed to join up some of the data with a MySQL database to get a more in depth analysis of what was going on with one of my web projects. Much to my chagrin it looked like Analytics will only give 500 lines in a report.

A little sleuthing in Google groups dug up some posts that have a tip on getting past the 500 line barrier. Just add “&limit=50000” to the Google Analytics URL and you’ll have up to 50,000 lines in your downloaded report. I’ve tried more that that’s as much as they’ll give you.

A while back I wrote about my frustration with Firefox’s poor Java performance on Java intensive sites, most notably while using Google’s Analytics or making a new [and editing] posts on Blogger.

It seemed that Google did a change to solve this problem though I did experience this problem still on other websites or if I had a lot of other tabs running [I have a habit of opening up many tabs of tangential info for later perusing]. That and editing on Blogger was still better with IE.

I also noticed another problem when opening up another site or downloading a file. The browser would seem to hang, you couldn’t do anything for a second or two and then all of a sudden things would be moving. I tested IE 6 on these sites with downloading and opening up in a new window and IE was incredibly robust and responsive by comparison.

Firefox 1.5.0.6 finally brings Firefox where it should be making it more usable than IE. The tab feature for me makes Firefox head and shoulders over IE 6 now that Firefox seems to have resolved it’s performance issues. It’s no longer painful to edit on Blogger with Firefox and downloading files no longer causes brief lockups of the browser.

It seems that when I’m using Firefox on pages that use lots of JavaScript, for example blogger.com or Google’s Analytics, the performance of Firefox has been less than stellar.

The less than inspiring performance of Firefox, well lets face it’s downright poor to shitty at times, seems to have cropped up somewhere from versions 1.5.0.0 to 1.5.0.4. For some reason these versions when running on an intensive Java scripted page like to glom over the CPU taking up around 50%, especially when editing a rather large blogger post.

I tried editing the same huge post with IE and it worked like a charm. Looks like Bill gets a reprieve from me switching exclusively to Firefox. I’m now using IE to edit blog posts and accessing Google Analytics while using Firefox for everything else as I’m hooked on the sexy tab feature.

Hopefully the Firefox gang will quickly address the frustrating performance issues.

I have to say that the Linksys tech support has been very good. I had submitted a ticket last Saturday and wasn’t expecting a response until Monday and of course had figured out that SFTP would be easier to get working than FTP.

Low and behold I had received a response and suggestion from their tech support. I replied that I had tried there suggestions already and then solved my issue by changing to SFTP. I was impressed that their tech support person responded on a Saturday.

Sunday I received the following reply from their tech support:

Dear Demetri,

Thank you once again for contacting Linksys Technical Support.

From what I understood in your email, an FTP client is able to connect to your FTP server behind the router for as long as passive mode is disabled.

This is actually the first time that I heard about an FTP client not connecting through passive mode since it is what we normally suggest to clients connecting to an FTP server behind a Linksys router.

For troubleshooting purposes, we suggest that you adjust the MTU value of the router. Another option is to do a firmware reflash and see if it would help.

You may download the firmware of your router at www.linksys.com/download. For firmware upgrade instructions, refer to this link below:

Title: How to Upgrade the Firmware on a Linksys Router

Be sure to reset the router once the upgrade is complete. These are the steps on how to hard reset your router:

1. Press and hold the reset button for 30 seconds.
2. Unplug the power supply for 10 seconds.
3. Turn on the router.

Resetting will return the password, forwarding, and other settings on the router to the factory default settings. In other words, the router will revert to its original factory configuration. You will lose Internet connection thru the router until you set the unit up again.

Hope this helps.

Thank you and have a nice day.

If you have further questions, please send us an e-mail at support@linksys.com so that we may further assist you.

You may also visit our knowledge base at www.linksys.com/kb for other concerns and basic troubleshooting of your Linksys product/s.

Sincerely,

XXXX XXXXXXXXX

I’m impressed that they really want to get FTP working for my through my router. I don’t blame them, I’m sure it was working years ago … under an older firmware. I feel bad though not trying to do this again. I did try an altered MTU with no luck and I just figured if it’s now working with SFTP, which is better/more secure I might add than regular FTP, there’s no point in trying anything else.

Anyway I’ve always been impressed with the products and I’m now pleasantly surprised to find out the Tech support is pretty persistent in solving problems.

I thought this should be pretty easy, just login to the admin console for my Linksys BEFSR11 single port cable/DSL router and enable the port forwarding to the server on my private network.

It didn’t work. I could login from a remote server but I couldn’t get a directory listing. I did a little research on Google and found out that my problem was probably due to issues with Active vs Passive FTP. I’m embarrassed to admit that I had no idea that there were two different ways for FTP clients to behave.

I’m also a little disappointed that either this wasn’t covered in any of my MCSE texts, courses, and exams or that I had not bothered to record this information. Ironically the IIS exam was one of my best scores, 993, and I scored a perfect 1000 on the TCP/IP exam to achieve my MCSE for NT 4.

I was also further confused that I had not encountered this error previously with any of the firewalls that I had configured when I was an Admin at Federated Insurance. I guess the Shiva Firewall made things easy.

So I obsessed over getting this to work. I checked out the answer section at Linksys’ site and found that I need to open up both UPD and TCP and use ports 20 & 21. I configured the FTP forwarding as indicated by Linksys and I did receive some patial success.

I was able to FTP into the server from an external client but it had to be with passive mode turned off. Not a problem I thought, but I wanted to set this up so that I can post on Blogger and have the new posts FTPed by Blogger to my server at home. I’d rather have my blog on www.demetri.ca than on the blogspot address. A little in part to vanity but mostly because I’ve had demetri.ca registered for many years.

So I setup blogger for FTP and it was not able to connect. My speculation is that blogger only uses active FTP and therefore is just not going to work with the limited configuration I can do with my Linksys router.

So I decided to setup a Linux server and try SFTP to see if that would work and fortunately it worked no problem. All I needed to do was open up port 22 and point it to the Linux box … and of course spend a couple of hours installing Red Hat Linux (sorry to keep you waiting Heather) and configuring Apache for serving up my blog.