Posted in Commentary with tags Rogers on August 17, 2021 by itnerd
A quick recap in case you are coming to this story late.
My wife and I wanted to save some money on our telco services. And at the same time we wanted to get some extra speed as Bell offers the fastest Internet speed available. So the original plan was to move to Bell and use their Fibe product. But our attempt to do that went off the rails very quickly when we tried to order their services online for next day installation. And then to add insult to injury, they then very aggressively tried to upsell us at the same time.
Total #Fail.
After pulling the plug on Bell because of their lack of customer focus, we ordered an upgrade kit to make the move to Rogers Ignite. By going to Ignite, we would save about $80 a month. We ordered the kit on a Saturday afternoon online, and we got it on Sunday morning. That blew our minds. And the install was almost painless. The only thing that didn’t go to plan was the install of Rogers Home Phone. But Rogers got that sorted in about an hour after I called them. Now I have done a couple of follow ups on their Ignite IPTV box and their Ignite WiFi Hub that doubles as a gateway for your home phone. All those services have not only worked flawlessly, but the downstream speed of my Internet connection is above Gigabit speeds. All that has been very positive. The only thing was outstanding was billing. Now in our previous interactions with Rogers, when my wife and I tend to make a change with, the billing will get screwed up. That means we’d have to spend time and effort to fix that. And as a result we end up frustrated with Rogers
That didn’t happen this time. All the billing changes happened transparently in the background without any intervention on the part of my wife or I. Now we did note that we had two TV boxes on our Rogers account for about 10 days or so, but a call to Rogers (which required a 16 minute hold to speak to a human which is a bit of a #fail) put our mind at ease on that front. The Rogers rep that we spoke to explained that we were still in the middle of a billing cycle which is why two TV boxes were on our account. Once we rolled over to the next billing cycle, the old TV box would disappear. And it did right when they said it would.
In other words, this went almost perfectly.
Now I give Rogers a lot of criticism. For example, I have been very critical of them not having Internet services that compete with Bell, or Telus for that matter when it comes to speed. But this transition to Rogers Ignite has been pretty much painless on almost every front. Shockingly so in fact. And Rogers customer service has been top shelf. What my wife and I learned was that while Rogers has some serious work to do to offer services that fully compete with Bell, Rogers customer experience absolutely destroys Bell’s customer experience. And a extremely positive customer experience is often more than enough to make up for not being the best guy on the block. Which in terms of their Internet offering, Rogers isn’t. So I would like to give kudos to Rogers for making this a very positive experience. Though at the same time I will say that Rogers needs to quickly do something about the fact that their flagship Internet plan is Gigabit downstream and 30 Mbps upstream which is simply not anything close to being competitive in 2021 when Bell is offering Gigabit downstream and 750 Mbps upstream, or even 1.5 Gigabit downstream and 940 Mbps upstream.
Finally, a quick word for Bell. You had a chance to steal a Rogers customer because your Internet services are fast. And we were even willing to look past the negative interactions that we have had with you in the past because the services that you offer are fast. But your customer experience not only sent us running back to Rogers, but for the foreseeable future we aren’t planning on leaving Rogers because they way you treat your customers is simply shambolic. If you want to change that, you need to prove that you won’t make your customers feel like they have spent time in a high pressure car dealership and that they need a shower afterwards because the slime factor was so high. Now my wife and I don’t think that you’re up to the challenge. But we are free to not only be surprised, but we are open to discussing this with you so that you can understand why we feel the way we do. Not that we expect you to reach out because we know that you’ve read the posts related to this story, and you haven’t reached out despite the fact that our contact info is very easy to find. That likely tells us all that we need to know Bell as an organization and what Bell thinks of their customers. An organization that is customer focused wants to hear about the things that go wrong so that they can improve the customer experience. And it appears that Bell isn’t that sort of organization because they appear that they could care less. Thus we’re not holding our collective breath in terms of anyone from Bell contacting us.
In the meantime, my wife and I will go back to enjoying Rogers Ignite. It may be slower than what Bell offers, but the customer experience that Rogers offers is far better. Which is why it’s in our home at the moment.
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.
Posted in Products with tags Rogers on August 6, 2021 by itnerd
As part of my upgrade to Rogers Ignite is that my Rogers NextBox 3.0 got replaced with this:
This is the Rogers Ignite IPTV box. It is very small as it occupies the space of two iPhone 12’s both in width and height. It does feel very plasticky and it’s very light from a weight perspective.
On the back, you get from left to right an Ethernet port, an HDMI port, and a power port that is USB-C. As you can see, I didn’t use the Ethernet port because this IPTV box supports WiFi connectivity on the 5 Ghz band. And it works very well. There were no issues that I noted. No dropped frames. No pausing. Nothing. The experience was pretty impressive.
There’s one other feature that this Rogers Ignite IPTV box has. It’s the remote:
This remote (which Rogers calls the XR15) is a Godsend. I had memorized every channel that I view when I had the NextBox 3.0. A lot of them changed when I moved to the Rogers Ignite IPTV box. Fortunately the remote has a voice search feature that allows me to search for channels, actors names, run apps, or whatever. For the most part the voice recognition works well. Though it does have the odd quirk. For example, if I was searching for the T+E channel, I would have to say “T plus E” rather than “T And E” to find it. But I can let that slide as that seems to be an edge case.
Another plus is that you get a PVR function “in the cloud” that allows you to store 200 hours of HD or 4K TV. Because it’s “in the cloud”, if you ever have to swap Ignite IPTV boxes, you don’t lose your recordings. That’s very cool. The box also uses Bluetooth so that you can pair a set of Bluetooth headphones and listen privately. Or pair a pair of speakers to enhance your listening pleasure. Finally, you can add channels like Disney+, Netflix and Amazon Prime Video to it. And the cool part is that the costs of these channels show up on your Rogers bill. That’s really handy to consolidate your spending on streaming. I should note that you do get YouTube among other free options.
From what I can see, Rogers is making a serious attempt to put the Rogers Ignite IPTV box in a position to displace your Chromcast, Apple TV, Roku or any other streaming device. In my case, it hasn’t stopped me from using the built in Roku on my TCL TV. But I admit that Rogers has kind of given me an incentive to at least think about doing just that. Because Rogers really has a winner on its hands here.
Posted in Products with tags Rogers on August 5, 2021 by itnerd
I have had Rogers Ignite for a few days now. And I’ve had a chance to try their Ignite based home phone, TV, and Internet. I’ve noted a few things about the service that I’d like to touch upon. I’ll start with the Rogers Ignite WiFi Hub, which is the Technicolor CGM4331COM (AKA the XB7 Generation 2) modem:
On the front, it looks kind of unremarkable. A single LED light that changes color depending on the status of the modem is all that you see. But the really interesting stuff is in the back:
Starting from the top are two RJ11 jacks for phone service. That’s kind of important because it allows users of Rogers Home Phone service (like me) to use one device for both Internet and Home Phone rather than using separate devices.
Below the RJ11 jacks are four Ethernet ports. Three of them are Gigabit. But the fourth one, the one that in this picture has an Ethernet cable cable plugged into it is a 2.5 Gigabit port. Why is that important? You’ll get better performance if you have the hardware to support it. In my case, I have the Rogers Ignite WiFi Hub set up in bridge mode (meaning that I turned off all the routing functions of the hub), and I have it hooked up to my ASUS ZenWifi AX XT8 mesh WiFi system which also has a 2.5 Gigabit port. Let me illustrate this. Here’s my speedtest.net result when the ASUS ZenWiFi system was plugged into the Gigabit port:
Now these results don’t suck. But when I plug my ASUS ZenWiFi system into the 2.5 Gigabit port on the Rogers Ignite WiFi Hub, this is the best speed test that I got (though I will note that repeated speed tests were slightly slower on the downstream):
My downstream speed is much faster. Also I would ignore the drop in upload speed. I re-ran the tests and got 33 to 34 Mbps most of the time. I’ll also note that while my ping times have gone up slightly, the jitter, which you can get a definition of here, has gone up as well. Though in additional testing, the jitter and ping values did vary a lot. But even the result that is pictured above is perfectly acceptable in my books. The bottom line is that this is a very nice speed boost that I will gladly take. Though I cannot claim that either myself or my wife are noticing the difference.
It supports the use of WiFi pods to extend coverage if you have a big property.
The net result is that if you actually use Rogers WiFi hub to power your home network, your Internet access will likely be pretty decent. And even if you are in my use case which is to disable all of that in favor of my own WiFi gear, your Internet access is still pretty decent. What’s interesting about this hardware is that Rogers is clearly planning something to increase speeds so that they can better compete with Bell which have faster upstream and downstream speeds. If they weren’t planning that, they wouldn’t be deploying this hardware to customers as this hardware clearly has headroom. Hopefully, any sort of speed increase by Rogers needs to come sooner rather than later as 30 Mbps upstream in their gigabit offering doesn’t really cut it.
Tomorrow, I’ll look at the Rogers Ignite IPTV TV box and I will let you know my impressions of that.
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.
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.
It appears that the Rogers/Shaw merger which is already being opposed by the Conservative Party Of Canada is also opposed by a whole lot of Canadians. Open Media put out a press release on Friday saying that a petition opposing the merger has surpassed 61,000+ Canadians. According to the press release, OpenMedia and a number of other civil society groups have issued a joint statement, warning Canadians of the merger’s dire implications, encouraging them to speak out.
Clearly Canadians are responding to this and don’t want this merger to go through. The question that you have to ask if the Canadian Government is listening.
In one of the most tone deaf things that I have seen lately, Suzanne Rogers, the wife of Rogers Communications and Blue Jays chairman Edward S. Rogers posted an Instagram story that included a picture of her family with former President of the United States Donald Trump over the weekend. The photo was apparently taken at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida. This Instagram story was then deleted. But not before it was captured by a few people, including Cultmtl and blogTO who posted it for all to see.
So, let’s count the #Fails here:
The Rogers family travelled outside of Canada during a global pandemic when a lot of Canadians can’t or have decided not to do so. Because depending on where in Canada you live, you might be under a stay at home order (Ontario for example is and as far as I know the Rogers family lives in Ontario). And travel outside the country is only for “essential” purposes And you have to wonder if they would have adhered to the quarantine rules that Canada has when they returned to Canada.
Donald Trump isn’t liked by a whole lot of people right now. So if you’re associated with him in any way, that’s not going end well for you.
This has created significant backlash online today. Here’s some examples:
Here is Ted Rogers (of Rogers) and his family last night. Even ignoring the Trump thing, it’s amazing that if you’re rich enough you’re still allowed to go on vacations to Florida. I wonder if they’ll have to spend two weeks in a quarantine hotel? pic.twitter.com/6Uj3f7K7Vk
— andrew aka stackmaster (@andrewneville) May 2, 2021
It’s slap in the face , to every Canadian who endures the exorbitant bills and monopoly imposed by Rogers , to see how un Canadian it’s their show of lack of empathy to the millions of people affected by Donald Trump.
Was debating switching from @FreedomMobile to @Rogers but then found out the Roger's family during lockdown stay at home orders went to Mar-a-lago to hang with #trump. I guess @Bell or @TELUS will get my business now. Glad I didn't buy a unit at Roger's m-city condos now.
What I can’t understand is how the @Rogers family could be so clueless and not realize that being seen with Trump would destroy their image and any respect people would have for them and hurt their company’s image.
This last tweet also brings up another part of the blowback. Ryerson University who has an association with Suzanne Rogers did their own #fail regarding this which started with posting this:
The Ryerson School of Fashion also posted a statement inviting “Suzanne Rogers to enter into a dialogue with our faculty, staff and students to discuss the impact that Trump and his community has had on further harming members of the fashion industry who are low income, Black, brown, Asian, disabled, Indigenous, trans, queer, and/or part of other systemically marginalized communities.”
Now that’s all good. But they then dropped themselves in it by doing this:
The post was later removed and replaced with a message from Ryerson University which includes the following: “We do not believe social media is the appropriate platform to judge the actions of others.” It also goes on to say, “We will be respectful of differing viewpoints,” which did little to quell the ire, especially among those associated with the Ryerson School of Fashion.
And what makes it worse for Ryerson is this:
Ben Barry, the Ryerson School of Fashion’s Chair and Associate Professor of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, shot back on Instagram Stories with a message that the Ryerson University statement “are Ryerson’s words not mine or our school,” referring to the School of Fashion.
And now Ryerson is facing as much ire as the Rogers family is. And some of it is clearly coming from inside Ryerson.
I am going to be very interested to see how Rogers the telco, and the Rogers family respond to this self inflicted gunshot wound to the foot. Because I think this may actually be something that sticks and they have to respond to as the optics of this situation are pretty bad.
Posted in Commentary with tags Rogers on April 20, 2021 by itnerd
Rogers who is likely still smarting from the epic outage that pretty much inconvenienced their users who are likely working from home in the middle of a global pandemic decided throw their users a bit of a bone. Rogers has again apologized and is now saying they will be giving customers wireless bill credits for the outage.
A credit equivalent to yesterday’s wireless service fee will be applied your May bill. This will be done automatically & no action is required by you. (2/4)
I suppose that this is a good thing. But for the average user, that may only be about $5 at most. Rogers won’t even notice this credit in their quarterly financials. But they’re really doing this for optics reasons. After all, they’re trying to buy Shaw and the blowback from that has been epic. Thus they really need to make this #Fail go away as quickly as possible. All I have to say is good luck with that as I am pretty certain that Rogers customers aren’t going to forget this any time soon and may make a change in terms of whom their telco of choice is.
Posted in Commentary with tags Rogers on April 19, 2021 by itnerd
Rogers has had outages that have affected their wireless voice and data services, along with their Internet services since very early this morning. The issues are nationwide in scope. Downdetector was showing Rogers outages beginning overnight and spiking to more than 12,000 reports in the daylight hours. The outages appeared most prevalent in southern Ontario and Montreal.
This is bad on a number of levels for Rogers. For example, here’s what Peel Regional Police (which is the region just west of Toronto Canada) had to say:
#PRP wants to notify our community that @Rogers cellphone service is currently dealing with a Canada-wide outage. We want to inform everyone that if you call 9-1-1 and hang up, our communicators are unable to call back, so please stay on the line. #911Awarenesspic.twitter.com/FWBPeh2mXs
That’s not trivial. And other police forces had similar messages.
Then there’s the fact that this is a global pandemic and people are forced to work from home as a result. Making the Internet an absolute essential utility. Here’s what one Rogers customer thought about this:
Me: I’m going to work from home this week and stay safe!
Some pointed out that Rogers is likely going to lose customers over this.:
“Intermittent” I haven’t been able to call, text or use data since midnight. With no “breaks”. That’s not intermittent. That’s a chronic outage. I predict Rogers is gonna lose a lot of money today. #notpayingfortoday#mightevencancel
You have to wonder if Bell Canada is getting a lot of calls today from people who want to switch. But the biggest area where this is going to hurt Rogers is that they’re trying to buy Shaw communications at the moment. Rogers argues that this is a good thing for Canadians. Though some don’t agree. But this outage will likely have this reaction with Canadians as the optics of this outage at this exact moment in time is not good:
Tell me again why Rogers buying Shaw is a good thing for customers?
At present, Rogers appears to be still working on the issue, and in some cases they are directing customers to this page for updates. But this page only refers to wireless issues. It doesn’t reference any home or business Internet issues as I have received calls on both today. Thus if you do have issues with your Rogers services, it’s not you, it’s them. And it’s going to be a very bad day for Rogers as a result.
The original Tweet translates to: “It’s amazing how scandalous the media are when a data breach from a QC flagship happens but when it’s Canada boaf it’s not that bad #DataLeak @tvanouvelles @LP_LaPresse @RadioCanadaInfo”
So has Rogers suffered a data breach? Inquiring minds want to know.
UPDATE #2: Rogers has put out a statement saying that a software update from Ericsson caused today’s fiasco. Too bad the damage has been done. Assuming that what Rogers is saying is true of course. I say that because prominent politicians are coming out to hammer Rogers:
I'm so glad my Shaw internet is working today while Rogers wireless appears to be down. It's great to have choice in service providers.
— Michelle Rempel Garner (@MichelleRempel) April 19, 2021
More than ever ppl rely on the internet to stay connected – especially in this pandemic.
Today's outage is a symptom of a larger problem.
The Liberal govt must promote real competition instead of protecting the profits of telecoms giants like Rogers, Bell and Telus.
Given that the Liberal Government in Ottawa is in a minority Parliament, if they want to stay in power, they may have to bend to the will of the opposition. Sucks to be you Rogers. In any case, service is slowly returning to normal. But it may take several hours for full service to be restored.
A Final Follow Up To My Move To Rogers Ignite Services
Posted in Commentary with tags Rogers on August 17, 2021 by itnerdA quick recap in case you are coming to this story late.
My wife and I wanted to save some money on our telco services. And at the same time we wanted to get some extra speed as Bell offers the fastest Internet speed available. So the original plan was to move to Bell and use their Fibe product. But our attempt to do that went off the rails very quickly when we tried to order their services online for next day installation. And then to add insult to injury, they then very aggressively tried to upsell us at the same time.
Total #Fail.
After pulling the plug on Bell because of their lack of customer focus, we ordered an upgrade kit to make the move to Rogers Ignite. By going to Ignite, we would save about $80 a month. We ordered the kit on a Saturday afternoon online, and we got it on Sunday morning. That blew our minds. And the install was almost painless. The only thing that didn’t go to plan was the install of Rogers Home Phone. But Rogers got that sorted in about an hour after I called them. Now I have done a couple of follow ups on their Ignite IPTV box and their Ignite WiFi Hub that doubles as a gateway for your home phone. All those services have not only worked flawlessly, but the downstream speed of my Internet connection is above Gigabit speeds. All that has been very positive. The only thing was outstanding was billing. Now in our previous interactions with Rogers, when my wife and I tend to make a change with, the billing will get screwed up. That means we’d have to spend time and effort to fix that. And as a result we end up frustrated with Rogers
That didn’t happen this time. All the billing changes happened transparently in the background without any intervention on the part of my wife or I. Now we did note that we had two TV boxes on our Rogers account for about 10 days or so, but a call to Rogers (which required a 16 minute hold to speak to a human which is a bit of a #fail) put our mind at ease on that front. The Rogers rep that we spoke to explained that we were still in the middle of a billing cycle which is why two TV boxes were on our account. Once we rolled over to the next billing cycle, the old TV box would disappear. And it did right when they said it would.
In other words, this went almost perfectly.
Now I give Rogers a lot of criticism. For example, I have been very critical of them not having Internet services that compete with Bell, or Telus for that matter when it comes to speed. But this transition to Rogers Ignite has been pretty much painless on almost every front. Shockingly so in fact. And Rogers customer service has been top shelf. What my wife and I learned was that while Rogers has some serious work to do to offer services that fully compete with Bell, Rogers customer experience absolutely destroys Bell’s customer experience. And a extremely positive customer experience is often more than enough to make up for not being the best guy on the block. Which in terms of their Internet offering, Rogers isn’t. So I would like to give kudos to Rogers for making this a very positive experience. Though at the same time I will say that Rogers needs to quickly do something about the fact that their flagship Internet plan is Gigabit downstream and 30 Mbps upstream which is simply not anything close to being competitive in 2021 when Bell is offering Gigabit downstream and 750 Mbps upstream, or even 1.5 Gigabit downstream and 940 Mbps upstream.
Finally, a quick word for Bell. You had a chance to steal a Rogers customer because your Internet services are fast. And we were even willing to look past the negative interactions that we have had with you in the past because the services that you offer are fast. But your customer experience not only sent us running back to Rogers, but for the foreseeable future we aren’t planning on leaving Rogers because they way you treat your customers is simply shambolic. If you want to change that, you need to prove that you won’t make your customers feel like they have spent time in a high pressure car dealership and that they need a shower afterwards because the slime factor was so high. Now my wife and I don’t think that you’re up to the challenge. But we are free to not only be surprised, but we are open to discussing this with you so that you can understand why we feel the way we do. Not that we expect you to reach out because we know that you’ve read the posts related to this story, and you haven’t reached out despite the fact that our contact info is very easy to find. That likely tells us all that we need to know Bell as an organization and what Bell thinks of their customers. An organization that is customer focused wants to hear about the things that go wrong so that they can improve the customer experience. And it appears that Bell isn’t that sort of organization because they appear that they could care less. Thus we’re not holding our collective breath in terms of anyone from Bell contacting us.
In the meantime, my wife and I will go back to enjoying Rogers Ignite. It may be slower than what Bell offers, but the customer experience that Rogers offers is far better. Which is why it’s in our home at the moment.
1 Comment »