The IT Nerd

When my wife and I made the move to Rogers, we moved our home phone service to them. Now I have reviewed Rogers Home Phone back in 2010. But now that I had it full time, I figured that I should update the review.

The first thing that I need to update is the hardware that Rogers installs in your home. When I test drove it a few years ago, you got a very big and bulky box. These days, this is what you get.

You get this device as part of the deal. It’s thin and light and looks stylish.

At the back of this device you get 2 phone jacks on the left, USB and Ethernet ports for an unknown purpose as well as a connector for your Rogers cable line.

 This is a access cover that houses the backup battery that powers your home phone in the event of a power failure. It is replaceable. More on this battery in a bit.

Installation was easy and only took minutes. The Rogers tech that came out ran a separate cable line to the box and I connected my phone. He then did some work on his laptop and we had home phone. When I did some test calls, I found the call quality to be slightly better than what I was used to. For example, with my previous phone service I had difficulty hearing people who were calling us to be buzzed into our condo. With Rogers Home Phone, I found I had a much easier time hearing them. Bottom line, call quality is not an issue.

Now Rogers Home Phone has some unique features:

• TV Call Display: When someone calls in, you see a pop up at the bottom of the screen with the number and name. You can then use your Rogers remote control to send the caller to voice mail, clear the pop up, or choose options.
• Home And Away Voice Mail is a feature that has three options:
  • Voicemail to Text enables your home phone voicemail to be sent to your mobile device as a MMS. Receive MMS messages and listen to the audio file or read the transcribed text.
  • You can manage voice mail in a similar manner as Apple’s Visual Voicemail. You can also receive your voicemail messages on your mobile device as MMS.
  • You can have up to 5 mailboxes
  • You can see prompts that you have voice mail on your TV.
• You can get call logs as well as see if you have voice mail on your TV.
• Home And Away Online Manager: You can forward your calls, change your ring settings and manage your phone privacy settings from any computer with Internet access.

That’s on top of a number of features that you can choose from. You also get a variety of long distance plans to choose from whether you need to call in North America or someplace else on Earth.

Are there any downsides to Rogers Home Phone? There’s one that you have to take into account. Unlike Bell Home Phone service which has power coming through the phone line even in a blackout, Rogers Home Phone requires a battery backup to keep the phone going in the event of a blackout. You can expect the battery to last 5 hours and it is replaceable. For some people, that might be an issue. In my case, it was a factor. But I overcame that by using  an APC BackUPS 650 uninterruptible power supply as I have a number of them lying around. Given that the device that powers Rogers Home Phone draws 0.5 amps, I should be able to stretch another 45 minutes or more before things go dead.

Rogers Home Phone has a number of plans that start at $34.41 a month and depending on the plan you can choose the features and long distance plans that suit your needs. Though you might be able to do better if you bundle your services. Thus it pays to spend some time with a Rogers call centre representative to see what kind of deal that you can work out. If you compare what Rogers offers with what Bell offers, Rogers is cheaper and you have more features to choose from. If you can get Rogers Home Phone in your area, it is worth looking at for your Home Phone needs.

This entry was posted on September 2, 2014 at 6:14 am and is filed under Products with tags 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.