The IT Nerd

I’m pretty sure the folks in Rogers HQ at 1 Mount Pleasant in Toronto are not happy about this development. Reuters is reporting that the Competition Bureau is going to take a look at Rogers attempt to buy Shaw:

The Canadian regulator looking into telecom company Rogers Communications’ planned C$20 billion ($16 billion) purchase of Shaw Communications has obtained court orders to advance its review, the Competition Bureau said on Thursday.

In March, Rogers agreed to buy Shaw in a deal that would create Canada’s second-largest cellular and cable operator. 

The Canadian government was quick to say it would attract stiff regulatory scrutiny, including an investigation from the Competition Bureau and a parliamentary hearing. 

The orders obtained earlier this week will allow the bureau to compel companies including BCE Inc, TELUS Corp and Quebecor Inc-owned Videotron to produce records relevant to the investigation, a statement from the bureau said.

I am not an expert on this sort of thing. But I am thinking that the fact that this deal isn’t being rubber stamped by the relevant Canadian authorities has to concern Rogers as that would that opens up the possibility that someone will put the kibosh on this deal. Because many people think that this deal isn’t good for consumers as there would be less competition. Hopefully the Competition Bureau keep that in mind as they investigate this deal.

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.

My wife and I wanted to switch from Rogers to Bell because our pricing for what we get from Rogers was horrible. Specifically, TV, home phone and Internet. Not only that, Bell has as I’ve stated previously, a much better Internet offering than Rogers. Despite the fact that we have had issues with Bell in the past that made us ditch them, we were honestly going to give Bell another chance.

That turned out to be a massive mistake. Here’s why.

First, we placed our order online. It seemed simple enough. You go to the Bell website, pick the bundle that you want, fill in your information, set up a MyBell account, pick an install date, and you’re done. And it seemed to be that simple when we did this on Friday July 30th. And we planned for an install on Saturday July 31st between 1 and 3pm as that was the first date that was offered to us.

But it then came off the rails on Saturday morning. We got a call from Bell saying that our order didn’t go through and it needed to be fixed. But I suspect that this wasn’t true. For starters they were able to read off the exact order that we placed. That seems a little suspect. Also they were able to read off our install date. Then the Bell rep proceeded to try and upsell us on everything from cell phones to smart home monitoring. Which we were not interested in. And to add insult to injury, our install appointment for today was cancelled and they wanted to move us to Wednesday.

The cynic in me says that this was a bit of a bait and switch exercise by Bell. If you phone them, they will have the opportunity to upsell you till the cows come home. But if you order online, they don’t get that chance. So they invented a reason to try and upsell us. If that’s true, that’s pretty underhanded.

So, when we expressed to the Bell rep that we spoke to that this was a very sub optimal experience thus far, the person we spoke to cut our monthly bill by $40 and gave us Bell’s top tier Internet service. But only after trying to upsell us some more. That simply made the experience worse. And to top it all off, they couldn’t get our install date set for Saturday, so we were forced to choose next Saturday. You can call that the icing on the cake when it comes to a horrible customer experience.

After we hung up, my wife and I discussed this and we both agreed that this wasn’t worth it to switch to Bell. We haven’t even had their services installed yet and we’ve had a very negative and horrible customer experience. So we called back and cancelled the order. What was amazing was that the two Bell reps that we spoke to wanted to cut our prices even more to keep our order on the books, even though we explained the reason why we wanted to cancel the order had nothing to do with pricing and everything to do with the customer experience. That was mind blowing.

Total time invested in this circus: 2 hours. And our entire Saturday is ruined as we cancelled our plans to try and make this switch happen.

So to cut our Rogers bill, we’re going to go with “upgrading” our telco services to Rogers Ignite. That will save us a few bucks. Though our Internet will still be the same 1GB service, which is roughly 940 mbps downstream and 30 mbps upstream that we get now from Rogers as opposed to Bell’s 1GB downstream and 750 mbps upstream which is vastly superior. So that’s not a upgrade. But it will do until better options come along. Hopefully Rogers doesn’t screw that up. I’ll keep you posted on that front with a follow up to this story. Or put another way, Rogers who I know reads my posts is on notice to put the their best foot forward so that they don’t end up looking as bad as Bell.

As for Bell, we gave them a second chance because their Internet offering frankly is better than anything that Rogers offers. And we were hoping that their customer service had improved. But clearly that is not the case. If Bell dealt with customers in a honest and straightforward manner, treated them with respect and dignity, and delivered on their promises, they could take over the telco industry in Canada. But they don’t do any of that that. The net result is that while we have our issues with Rogers, for now they are the least worst option for us.

UPDATE: At 4:20 PM this afternoon, a rep from Bell called us back to “recreate” our order. His word not mine. My wife quickly shot the Bell rep down saying that we had cancelled the order because of their poor customer service and to never call her again. This just blows my mind as surely their customer relationship management system had the events that happened earlier in the day. And what’s worse is the fact that there was zero recognition or acknowledgement on their part of their rather shambolic customer service. If they call again today, I pity the person at the other end of that conversation as my wife will simply destroy them because she is that mad at Bell at the moment. And likely for the foreseeable future.

Also just to clarify something, all Bell had to do is to accept the order that we placed online, show up today and install it and we’d be happy. But they didn’t so that’s why we’ll never deal with Bell again.