The IT Nerd

Let me bring you up to speed with my latest issue with Rogers Ignite Gigabit Internet. After I posted the original story, my issue got escalated to the Office Of The President at Rogers. That means that my issue was being taken seriously by Rogers. That might have something to do with:

A) My profile as a blogger.

B) The fact that I was considering bolting to Bell to get decent Internet service.

C) All of the above.

Now the person that I was dealing with was extremely responsive and attentive. I will give him points for that. However, I am not sure if he had to do much. I say that because during this period, Rogers had two serious outages. And I do mean serious. Now once they were resolved, things actually improved greatly and my connection was almost back to normal. But it wasn’t totally normal as I still suffer from the occasional lag spike that is short lived. As in lasting for just a second or two. But even that was a huge improvement over what I was dealing with before, thus I can live with that. But this wasn’t there before Rogers rather problematic rollout of DOCSIS 3.1 which I have documented here since late last year. Thus it is safe to say that Rogers still has a lot of work to do before I consistently get the service that I am paying for, and I had previous to that rollout.

Speaking of paying, the upshot of this experience was that the Office of The President dropped the cost of our TV, Internet and home phone from $195 a month to $155 a month until April 2019. This is a $40 reduction that they served up because according to them my wife and I were long standing customers of Rogers and they appreciate our business. The cynic in me also thinks that this is due to the fact that we were thinking of bolting to Bell because of these Internet issues and this is a way to keep us from doing that. But whatever the reason, we’ll take it. Lower telco costs in Canada are always a good thing as Canadians pay way too much in the first place for their telco services. Having said that, it’s not going to stop us from bolting if we continue to have issues in the future as we’ve tried out Bell’s Fibe Gigabit Internet in our friends units, and it is very tempting to switch to that because of the speed it offers both upstream and downstream and the fact it according to my tests offers a very low latency connection to the Internet.

Rogers clearly has issues with their Ignite Internet service and their rollout of DOCSIS 3.1. A quick look at places like Red Flag Deals, DSLReports, and even their own Rogers community forums illustrate this. They really need to get a handle on this and quickly. Otherwise the bad press that issues like these generate will simply mount to the point where it will be difficult for them to get customers in areas where Bell offers a competitive product. And even in areas where they don’t have to worry about Bell. I’m sure Rogers and their shareholders don’t want that. Thus they may want to redouble their efforts to have a stable and reliable Internet offering.

This entry was posted on March 16, 2017 at 8:46 am and is filed under Commentary 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.