The IT Nerd

Yesterday, I told you the story of our attempt to switch to Bell Canada from Rogers because our cable bill was too high, and Bell has a way faster Internet offering. That of course went horribly sideways and resulting us deciding to forget about switching to Bell and instead switch to Rogers Ignite platform. That would accomplish the saving of money part. But it won’t do anything about our Internet speed. And we were fine with that. So we pulled the trigger on that via the MyRogers portal.

A couple of hours later, we got a shipment notification with a tracking number for Purolator Courier that didn’t appear in their system when I went to look it up. We were surprised, but I figured that Rogers had just printed the label and it would be picked up on Tuesday from Rogers and delivered to us later in the week.

Imagine our surprise when we got a knock on the door early this morning and there was a box outside with these two pieces of Rogers gear in it:

This is the brand new Rogers Ignite modem which also doubles as a gateway for our home phone.

And this is our new Rogers Ignite IPTV TV box which absolutely dwarfs the cable box that we were using up until today.

So at this point, Rogers was over performing. We ordered something from them online. And it showed up insanely quickly. This is the exact opposite experience that we had with Bell. So Rogers is scoring points with us so far. But now came the part that I was dreading. There was no way that this was going to be set up easily and quickly because from prior experience with Rogers, this is where things go sideways.

Let’s walk through the setup process, and how each part went for me:

• Internet: Plug it in, download the Ignite WiFi App, follow the prompts in the app. Done. It was insanely easy.
• TV: Plug it in, hook it up to your TV using an HDMI cable. Follow the prompts onscreen. Done. It was insanely easy.
• Home Phone: This is where things came unstuck…. Sort of. I should have been able to just plug in the phone into the back of the modem and get a dial tone. The dial tone part never happened. So it was a call to Rogers and after finding that I would have to wait online for over 30 minutes, I requested a call back. Rogers called back in 25 minutes which was again over performing on their part. But the tech that called back couldn’t get our phone working. Though I will say he tried really hard to do so. He eventually opened a ticket and said that it would be working in a couple of hours. It was working in less than one hour. All things considered, I would say that Rogers over performed .

So at this point I could have declared victory and had a beer. Ignoring the fact it was about noon and that was early for beer, I had a couple of extra tasks to perform. The first being that I wanted to put the Rogers modem into bridge mode (which makes the Rogers gear act as just a modem as opposed to a router/modem combo) as I have my own network gear via my Asus ZenWiFi AX XT8 mesh network that I wanted to use instead of Rogers gear. The reasons for that were two fold:

• It’s not that I don’t trust Rogers, but if I have my own gear that I have personally locked down, I can ensure that nobody is getting into my network.
• I as a rule never rely on my ISP’s gear to run my home network. It also makes it easy to change ISPs.

Putting the Rogers modem into bridge mode is insanely easy. And Rogers has the instructions in this support document with warnings that you might break your Rogers TV service if you do this. Which is 100% true as that’s what happened to me. But I got my TV service back online simply by connecting the Rogers IPTV box to my home network.

Total time invested: 2 hours….. Which unlike the two hours that my wife and I spent with Bell yesterday was completely productive.

Now over to the Internet speed part. I did some speed tests from my router which is directly connected to the Rogers Modem. Here’s what I got:

For comparison purposes, hers’s a speed test from the old Rogers hardware done a few days ago:

The speed is slightly higher. Which is good. The ping time went up, but is still more than acceptable as far as I am concerned. And the jitter, which you can get a definition of here, is a bit better. In other words, it’s pretty much the same overall from a numbers perspective.

The only task left is to send back our old Rogers hardware back to Rogers. And the only option to do that is via courier. Rogers supplied a label and we can reuse the box to do that. That will happen on Tuesday after the long weekend here in Toronto.

So, I will give kudos to Rogers for massively over performing during this whole experience. They allowed us to order the Ignite gear online and delivered the new gear shockingly quick. And the setup was mostly painless. Plus as my wife pointed out to me, Rogers isn’t nearly as slimy, aggressive, and used car salesmen like as Bell are. I have to admit I was That’s one major plus towards sticking with them. For now.

But the one outstanding item is the billing. Rogers has a history of screwing that up. But if they continue to over perform by not screwing that up this time around, then Rogers will have earned a significant amount of respect from yours truly and my wife. Expect an update on that front when we get visibility on that.

In the meantime, I will play with my new Roger gear. Expect an update of some sort on that later in the week.

This entry was posted on August 1, 2021 at 2:14 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Bell, 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.