The IT Nerd

I got up this morning expecting to have a quiet day. Then I asked the nearest HomePod mini what time it was, and when the HomePod mini in the living room responded that “I’m having trouble connecting to the Internet”, I knew that my day was going to be a very bad day. I went into the location where our Rogers Ignite gateway was and saw this:

In short, my Rogers connection was down. Again. And a quick look at Down Detector shows that it may not be just me:

This sent my wife and I into scramble mode as she had a few important meetings that she was going to do from home, but now I had to drive her to the GO Train station (that’s a regional commuter service for those of you reading this from outside of Ontario) so that she could go to the office and work. While I was driving her, she was phoning her office to get special permission to come in because they had just been told to stay home and work from home because of rising COVID rates in Ontario. More on that in a moment. Then I went to a Starbucks to grab email and at least try to get my day started.

Once I got to Starbucks, I got a few text messages from her saying that my job this week was to get us switched over to Bell. While we had a very negative experience the last time we tried to switch to them, we clearly are left with no other choice now. We have had numerous outages with Rogers over the past few months outside of the absolutely catastrophic outage that happened earlier this month. It’s made the ability for my wife and I to work from home problematic, and enough is enough. While I am no fan of Bell because of their poor customer service, they are reliable and offer a much better Internet product than Rogers as I’ve said previously. And to add to this, my wife’s workplace is not only transitioning their company cell phones from Rogers to another provider because of the outage earlier this month, they are encouraging their employees who are on Rogers to switch to another Internet provider. And will provide time off and a financial incentive to cover the cost of switching providers. They’re doing this because they want their employees to be able to work from home due to rising COVID rates, and Rogers in their view is an impediment to that.

So, while I wait for Rogers to do something about our latest Internet problem, I’ll be working on getting us over to Bell. And I’ll be documenting the process of switching to Bell over the coming days. I really didn’t wish it comes to this as Rogers has better customer service than Bell. And I know people who work at Rogers who are very good at their jobs and are generally nice human beings. But Rogers lack of reliability is leaving my wife and I no choice but to switch because in an an age of working from home and learning from home, the reliability of your Internet connection is the only thing that matters. And reliability is seriously lacking from Rogers Internet offering at the moment.

More to come.

UPDATE: I have to say that this is a gong show. My wife got an email from Rogers that looks like this:

So I guess based on this email that Rogers has an issue. But here’s where it becomes a gong show. I checked “Anna” which is Rogers virtual agent. And she said this:

That’s a serious disconnect between the virtual assistant and the email. This makes the virtual assistant useless. I have to wonder why the email and virtual assistant aren’t in sync as all this does is further push customers who are already on edge towards Bell.

UPDATE #2: So we are back online as of 1PM today. But this really wasn’t an event that shows Rogers in the best light. I continue to do my homework before pulling the trigger to move at Bell. But my wife and I are really close to doing so. Rogers via Twitter did ask for a chance to “turn things around.” But given their recent performance, I am not sure that I am willing to give them that chance. But Rogers as usual is free to convince me otherwise.

This entry was posted on July 18, 2022 at 8:58 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.