Thank you Ca3le for such an insightful and comprehensive reply.
I did try some of the speed tests with my notebook plugged directly into the router, although the wired connections to the router are all Gigabit with handmade (by me) ethernet cables, I still wanted to be able to tell Rogers support that it was a direct connection. I have made some interested discoveries in my search for what my true internet speeds are. Please feel free to move this to another forum if appropriate.
One of my biggest issues was that if I download files, I was getting much higher speeds than previously with Bell, but if i connect my VPN, the speeds slowed to about 10% of what I was getting without the VPN. In researching this I also discovered something interesting about my speeds as a whole;
If I run the speedtest from speedtest.net using the default (usually a very nearby server), I would get around 150MB downloads, so far so good, but if I select a server in another geographic location, i.e. Maryland or Germany, the speeds would drop off to around 30MB, which coincidentally were the speeds that I was consistently getting with Testmy.net. It seems to me that TMN gives me a far more realistic "real-world" speed result that speedtest. Now my problem is what to do about these "real-world" speeds? Rogers will claim that they are responsible for speeds to/from them, and what happens on the other side of the connection is beyond thier control, but it could also indicate that thier back-end connections are lousy and that is where the speed drop-offs occur.
What to do next? I'm still trying to get the folks at PrivateInternetAccess to help me find out why the speeds drop off so precipitously when I ceonnect he VPN (which they never did with Bell BTW), but now I also need to find out why my new utlra fast rogers connection is so poor outside my own geographic area.
Any other thoughts and experiences are greatly welcome, and thanks again Ca3le, I look forward to supplying you with the data you mentioned.
Cheers
John