The IT Nerd

You might recall that Bell not too long ago announced 8 Gbps service that is due to start rolling out in September. I guess that this was enough to make Rogers freak out and push out 8 Gbps service as well:

Rogers today announced that it is the first major provider in Canada to launch a new Wi-Fi modem with Wi-Fi 6E – the world’s most powerful Wi-Fi technology. Building on the newest generation of Wi-Fi technology, Wi-Fi 6E enables multi-Gigabit Wi-Fi speeds, ultra-low lag times, and increased capacity for more connections than ever before. Select customers in areas across Ontario, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland can now take advantage of the new Wi-Fi modem for the best in-home Wi-Fi experience that will revolutionize how they game, stream and connect, now and in the future.

Now of course there’s a catch. And here it is:

Building on its commitment to deliver the fastest Internet speeds of any major provider in Canada, Rogers premium Ignite Internet with 8 Gbps symmetrical speeds is now available for pre-order. 

Note the words “pre-order”. Rogers in their press release doesn’t say when it will actually be available. Contrast that with Bell who said that their 8 Gbps service will be available in September in Toronto, and elsewhere soon after that. And based on Bell’s previous history, if they say it, they deliver it. Thus this appears to be another “fiber to the press release” type of deal from Rogers where they announce something, but don’t actually put a stake into the ground as to when it will actually be delivered. Thus while this sounds interesting, until it actually rolls out it’s kind of meaningless. But I guess they need a distraction from their July outage related issues. Or their Shaw takeover related issues.

You know, if Rogers really wanted to regain to the trust of Canadians, they’d just be a whole lot more transparent about what happened in relation to the outage and what they plan to do about it. But as you know, they haven’t been transparent. Instead they’ve redacted a whole lot of their responses to the CRTC.

The Public Interest Advocacy Centre (PIAC) wants to change that. They have called on the CRTC to release confidential information Rogers filed on the July 8th service outage. You can see the filing here. But here’s why they want this information to be made public:

PIAC submits that if Rogers’ customers are to, at least in part, foot the bill for these significant remedial projects, then customers should know what they’re paying for and when to expect results. More detailed explanations of the investment initiatives will also allow the public to comment on whether the claimed investments are effective and proportionate solutions, and to raise questions on whether the stated plans reflect investments that were already planned or necessary prior to the outage. PIAC submits that due to the likelihood that these additional investment costs will be passed down to customers in the form of higher service prices, the public interest in disclosure outweighs any resulting specific direct harms to Rogers. Without more detailed disclosures, Rogers is asking consumers to simply “trust” that the proposed solutions will effectively fix the problem. However, the outage has significantly eroded public trust in Rogers. Keeping important details about the outage from public scrutiny only serves to further erode that trust. Disslosure of the information on the public record is part of the remedy for this loss of trust. Consumers then can see the exact measures Rogers proposes to fix their systems (at least at a high technical level) and can use their own judgment to consider if Rogers’ plans seem to be such a solution and by extension, whether to trust their public statements of network reliability in the future.

PIAC is 100% correct here. Rogers has only given vague promises as part of their attempt to be “committed to Canadians”. Something that has generated a huge amount of blowback because there’s nothing in there that would allow Canadians to hold them accountable for what they promise that they are going to do. The fact that a third party has to go this route to get information that Rogers should be providing by default into public view really illustrates that Rogers has a lot to hide and they aren’t serious about earning back the trust of Canadians.

I don’t expect Rogers to allow this information to see the light of day. And I expect that this will likely end up in court. Which even if Rogers wins, they lose in the court of public opinion because the public will simply think that they have a lot to hide. Which is why I would suggest to Rogers that they just release this information and let the chips fall where they may.