The IT Nerd

If you’re on Rogers High Speed Internet and you like to use the free Flickr Pro service that they provide, you can expect an e-mail like this one in your inbox shortly:

Dear Rogers Yahoo! customer,

We are writing to inform you that on July 1, 2009, your Flickr Pro account included with your Rogers Hi-Speed Internet service will change to a free Flickr account. The free Flickr service has many of the same features as Pro, but is subject to some limits.

Your existing photos or videos will not be deleted as a result of this change. If you have more than 200 photos in the free Flickr account, only the most recent 200 are displayed. Other changes include:

• 100MB monthly upload limit (10MB per photo)
• 2 video uploads each month (max. 90 seconds and 150MB per video)
• Only smaller (resized) images accessible (though the originals are saved in case you upgrade later)

If you enjoy the full flexibility and storage capacity of your current Flickr Pro account, you can maintain your Pro account by subscribing directly to the service for $24.95 (USD) a year. Subscribe before September 1, 2009 and get two months free. Click the link below to subscribe:
http://flickr.com/upgrade

For additional information or questions, please visit:
http://help.yahoo.com/l/ca/rogers/flickr/index.html

We want to thank you for being a Rogers Yahoo! customer. It is our pleasure to provide you with an enjoyable online photo experience.

Sincerely,

Rogers Yahoo! Hi-Speed Internet Customer Service

So to make sure that everyone is one the same page here, let me recap:

• Rogers used to give their subscribers a Flickr pro account free of charge to replace the Yahoo Photos service that was killed when Yahoo bought Flickr.
• As of July 1st, what used to be free will be $24.95 a year.
• If you don’t want to pay up, you get to use a half assed light version of Flickr

The issue has flared up on the Digital Home Canada message boards and the DSL Reports message boards where ticked off users are venting. Surprisingly, a Rogers sock puppet employee made an appearance in both places to try and defuse the issue. Keith McArthur, Senior Director of Social Media and Digital Communications at Rogers Communications posted this statement:

A very small number of our customers (less than 2 per cent) took advantage of the Flickr Pro service. For the vast majority of our customers, the bigger priority is faster speeds and more reliable service.

Last week, we doubled download speeds for hundreds of thousands of customers. We continue to invest in our network and look forward to bringing increasingly faster speeds to all our customers.

Keep in mind that these are the same guys who do DNS redirects when you type in a incorrect address to show you ads, and they are the same guys who do traffic shaping because they claim that they want to have high levels of customer satisfaction.

Oh yeah, as someone points out on the Digital Home Canada message boards, 2% of customers is 30,000 people. Not a small number to be sure.

If I were a Rogers High Speed Internet customer, I’d be ticked and looking for another ISP right about now. In fact, I’ll do you a favor and recommend that if you’re a Rogers High Speed Internet customer who’s not happy about this, and you can get DSL, take a look at Teksavvy and Acanac.

After all, if you’re going to pay somebody for Internet service, at least pay somebody who knows the meaning of the words “customer satisfaction.”

UPDATE: I should also mention that Rogers has been caught altering web page content in the past. That doesn’t exactly give me the warm fuzzies about them.

UPDATE #2: You’ll notice in the comments section that Keith McArthur of Rogers posted a comment. Thanks for posting! I try to be balanced when I post stories to my blog. Perhaps you’ll tell the decision makers within Rogers how unpopular this is and see what you can do to make this situation better. I can tell you right now you have a lot of unhappy campers out there right now, and that won’t be good for your business long term. BTW, does the fact that Keith McArthur has been posting on discussion boards and blogs like mine remind you of “Frank” of Comcast and his attempts to reach out to customers using social media to improve the image of Comcast? For me it does.

This entry was posted on May 14, 2009 at 1:39 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Flickr, Rogers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.