…. as I do work for his law firm on an ongoing basis. He was calling on behalf of his mother who got a letter from Rogers who provides her with Internet access. Specifically, the Ultra Lite Internet service as she is a senior citizen on a fixed income and doesn’t need a lot of speed to send e-mails and occasionally surf the Internet. The letter basically says that effective March 1, 2010:
- The monthly fee for Ultra Lite is going from $25.99 to $27.99
- The bandwidth cap drops from 60GB to 2GB
- The overage charge for exceeding the above bandwidth cap is $5/GB, with a maximum overage of $50 a month
Now new Ultra Lite customers have been getting a 2GB a month cap for something like a year now, but existing customers were grandfathered. That’s now coming to an end. In a nutshell, Rogers is now going to charge this senior citizen $2 a month more which in itself isn’t great. But price increases never are great and that’s life. The big thing is that they’re going to cut her bandwidth cap by 95%. In short, she gets less for more.
Needless to say, her son was pissed. Why? What he told me was “Rogers is trying to force people on the Ultra Lite tier to move up to the Lite or Express tiers which just happen to have special offers at the moment. Coincidence? I don’t think so. They’re also counting on the fact excessive surfing will cause users of Ultra Lite to go over their caps so that they’re charged the $5 per gigabyte penalty. That tells me that Rogers doesn’t have their customer’s interests in mind, and I don’t think my mother should have to deal with a company like that.”
He then asked me what other options were available in terms of Internet Access. I gave him my standard speech of what DSL providers exist, of which I usually mention two. Teksavvy and Acanac. After getting his mother on the phone, she decided on Teksavvy as she was able to get 5 Mbps downsream/800k upstream service for $29.95 a month, plus the cost of a modem (which can easily be found on Craigslist, assuming that you don’t buy it from the provider). Now she is subject to a 200 gigabyte cap every month, but that’s a significant increase from the 2 gigabytes that Rogers will be offering on March 1st. He found a modem on Craigslist and made arrangements with Teksavvy to get Internet access on her phone line later next week. Once the service is live, I’ll go over and set everything up. His mother has a GMail address, there’s no e-mail to switch, so this should be rather straightforward. Once they have a comfort level with Teksavvy, they will cancel Rogers Ultra Lite Internet.
What’s my view on this issue? I guess it’s similar to what I said about the news that Rogers was increasing their Internet overage fees. Bandwidth isn’t free and ISPs have to account for the different types of users that exist. Sometimes the way that ISPs decide to deal with this issue ticks users off. But I think that Rogers decision to cut the bandwidth cap on their existing Ultra Light customers was likely not the best decision. Counting this customer and the three customers I mentioned in the post about Rogers increasing their overage fees, plus other customer contacts I’ve received on both topics, I am up to 13 customers who aren’t happy with Rogers and are exploring other options for Internet access. To me, that’s not a small number. I should note that ticked off Ultra Lite customers are also showing up in places like DSL Reports and Digital Home Canada. But I’m guessing that ticked off Ultra Lite users are also showing up in the Rogers call center.
I think that Rogers has an opportunity right now to become the “anti-Bell” as many Canadians feel that both Bell and Rogers are evil and they don’t care about their customers. As a result they simply pick the one that is less evil. Rogers has been trying to change that perception of being evil by getting in front of issues by responding to blogs like mine and on Twitter. Heck, they even gave me a one month trial of Rogers Home Phone for me to review which is something that they’ve never done before for anybody. God forbid that Bell Canada would ever do anything like that. But the goodwill created by strategies like those can evaporate with moves like this.
Rogers really needs to rethink this, and fast. Otherwise they may find that this move did more harm than good.