May 23, 2008

Rogers employee fails

I currently have a cellphone and cable internet with Rogers, but on separate bills. Because of this, Rogers insists on calling me about once a month to offer to bundle the services together onto a single bill (along with cable TV and home phone). Alright, fine. I tell them, politely, that I don't want a TV or a home phone. I'm content with computer games and a cell phone. Whoever I'm talking to generally accepts that. However, they're clearly following a script, because they always, always, ask if I have any questions about my internet service.

So, eventually I started asking questions.

I started with some fairly complicated ones (stuff I didn't already know the answers to), and they were forced to refer me to tech-support. Fine. But eventually I got around to asking a really simple question, one they should all know the answer to. My internet connection speed is measured (on my bill and in Rogers advertising) in Mbps. What, I asked, does this stand for?

What I actually wanted to know was whether the M stood for 106 or 220. (It should be 106, but computer companies have an unfortunate tendency to use 220, because it's slightly larger, which makes e.g., hard disk capacities, look better. This is clearly the wrong thing to do.)

I was flabbergasted when the Rogers employee came back with "Mega-bytes per second". I asked him if he meant Mega-bits per second, and, after checking with his supervisor, he said "Yeah, it's bits, but everybody says bytes, so they're the same, technically."

Given this, I didn't bother trying to get my original question answered.

(For those of you who don't know the difference between bits and bytes, this Rogers employee is exaggerating the speed of their internet service by 800%.)