Another Follow Up To My Bell Phone Issue
I’ve been away on business for the last week, but I thought I’d give you an update to my issue with Bell and my home phone service that I previously wrote about. As you may recall, Bell’s rather poor customer service made me reach out to Rogers to see about test driving their home phone service. While my contact at Rogers continues to work on that, Rogers was kind enough to answer some questions about Rogers Home Phone that I had. The first one has to do with the fact that according to a Rogers technical support document that I read, the Home Phone service is backed by an battery. That concerns me as frequent readers will recall that I had a 36 hour power outage after a tornado went through the Greater Toronto Area. Here’s Rogers response to that:
Rogers Home Phone battery lasts between 6-8 hours depending on how much it is used during a power outage. Bell does not have a battery backup as their phone terminals are not installed in the customer’s home. However, this does not necessarily ensure that Bell’s service will remain active through an extended power outage. Some of Bell’s customers are serviced through Remote DLCs. These remotes have a battery backup and they will also fail if the power outage lasts long enough.
In case you are wondering what a remote DLC is, it stands for remote digital loop carrier. Wikipedia has a good article on what they are here. Now my Bell phone service comes from a central office about 1 KM from my condo and not a remote DLC, so I’m pretty sure based on my past experience that power would have to be out for days for that to become an issue. So 6-8 hours of home phone service in the event of a blackout does concern me. Perhaps I’m being a bit irrational about this. So I’ll ask all the Rogers Home Phone users to give me their input on this. Leave a comment and let me know if this is really an issue or not.
The next question comes via two customers of mine who got Rogers Home Phone but couldn’t get it to work with their alarm systems. One ended up switching back to Bell out of frustration. The other got a different alarm provider. Here’s what Rogers had to say on that topic:
Rogers Home phone service works with most alarm systems.
Hopefully Rogers has a list someplace of whom they don’t work with so consumers can make an informed choice before their service starts. Given the fact that I was the victim of a break in this past summer, that’s a potential concern to me. Plus it might be a deal breaker for some people out there.
The third question came from another customer of mine who had huge problems porting her phone number from Bell to Rogers when she tried to switch to Rogers Home Phone. Now this was in the early days of home phone (2007 if I recall correctly) where I would assume that the process to move from Bell to Rogers was kind of sketchy. I asked Rogers about this and here’s what they said:
Porting your number from Bell should only take a few days. At the time of the install, a mutually suitable date will be selected to do the install.
Hopefully, this is a non-issue, and I believe it is. But I’ll throw this out there. If you’ve had problems porting your number from Bell to Rogers in the last year, please leave a comment and tell me about it.
I had wanted to ask Rogers about how it deals with repair issues like the one I went through with Bell, but I decided against doing so as it isn’t fair to ask them about something that is basically a hypothetical situation. Of course, if Rogers wants to e-mail me and tell me about the quality their customer service when it comes to Home Phone, feel free to do so.
Oh yeah, my phone still works and Bell hasn’t contacted us in regards to the feedback that we left on their feedback website or to what has been written here or anywhere else in this blog. This despite the fact that as I type this, I have logged 63 different page views from IP addresses that I’ve traced back to BCE.
I think that tells me all I need to know about Bell Canada’s commitment to customer service. Which means that if Rogers gets me a trial of their Home Phone service and I like what I see (or hear as the case may be), I might be switching. Even if they don’t, I may switch anyway as clearly Bell Canada has no interest in dealing with their customers in a positive manner that creates goodwill about them.
December 27, 2009 at 10:43 pm
We had a 10 hour power outage in the northern GTA on August 10, 2009 from a severe thunderstorm. The power went out at 7:50 pm. My Rogers phone modem battery was dead by 12:20 am. 4.5 hour total. The phone was not used at all during this time other than to see if we still had a dial tone at 11:30 pm. Make sure your cell phones are charged. Other than that, we had no issues porting our number and the service has worked without any glitches since January 2008. I have no issue or complaints with our Rogers home phone. Bear in mind, I live in a newer subdivision so all of the cables and equipment in the boxes are less than 5 years old.
January 4, 2010 at 6:29 pm
We just switched from Bell to Rogers Home Phone and there was a blackout in the area for a couple hours on New Years Eve. When we got home at around 2am. The alarm stopped working since the phones were out. When the power came back on, we couldn’t get a dialtone to turn off the alarm (our alarm requires the phone to turn it off or on) and our phone kept saying that the line was in use but all phones were turned off since we only have one phone with a cord, the rest are cordless. We never had a problem with phone service during blackouts with bell. Even during that huge blackout a couple years ago, phone was still working fine the whole time through. May switch back to Bell Home Phone.