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Rogers Welcomes Newcomers with International Credit Recognition

Posted in Commentary with tags on August 28, 2024 by itnerd

Rogers Communications has announced a new partnership with Nova Credit, a cross-border credit bureau, to help newcomers to Canada build credit and finance a new smartphone, making their transition easier.

The collaboration enables Rogers to offer newcomers maximum credit by considering their international credit history when applying for a Rogers Red credit card, helping them establish a strong financial foundation in Canada. They can also take advantage of 0% interest financing on new Rogers devices through the Rogers Red credit card, to stay connected from day one while spreading payments over a longer time period. Newcomers can visit any Rogers retail store to apply.

At launch, Rogers will support newcomers by recognizing their credit history from nine countries, including Australia, India, Kenya, Nigeria, the Philippines, Spain, Switzerland, Ukraine and the United Kingdom. Rogers has plans to expand the program to additional countries in the future.

Newcomers approved for a Rogers Red credit card can access flexible device financing on new phones for up to 48 months at 0% interest. Customers can be approved instantly for a Rogers Red credit card in a Rogers retail store, allowing them to leave with both a new device and a credit card on their phone’s mobile wallet.

Rogers customers with a Rogers Red credit card can enjoy 3% cash back value when they redeem with Rogers, and the card has no annual fee. Customers can also stay connected with five Roam Like Home days at no extra cost every year with an eligible Rogers mobile plan. In 2024, Rewards Canada named the Rogers Red World Elite Mastercard the country’s Top No Fee Cash Back Credit Card.

For more information, please visit a Rogers retail store, or visit RogersBank.com/Newcomers and Rogers.com/Newcomers.

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Rogers Apparently Now Has 2Gbps Internet Speeds

Posted in Commentary with tags on July 28, 2024 by itnerd

A reader tipped me off to the fact that Rogers seems to have rolled out 2Gbps downstream Internet speeds. To confirm this, I hopped over to the Rogers website, punched in my address and saw this:

Rogers now seems to have a “Pro 2G” tier to their Internet offering. Previously their top tier was 1.5 Gbps downstream. Also of note is that the upstream speed is now 200 Mbps which is up from 150 Mbps. And this upstream speed appears to be available on their 250 Mbps package and up. Now while this is an improvement for Rogers, it still doesn’t match the speeds of Bell who are capable of doing Gigabit or faster both ways via fibre. Which means that I am pretty sure that Bell isn’t losing any sleep over this move by Rogers.

In terms of availability, it seems to be pretty widespread in Toronto based on some random address lookups that I did. It may be widespread elsewhere as well. Drop a comment below if you’re actually able to get this where you live.

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The CRTC Puts Out An Executive Summary About The July 2022 Rogers Outage

Posted in Commentary with tags , on July 6, 2024 by itnerd

A reader tipped me off to the posting of this executive summary written by a third party named Xona Partners Inc. on behalf of the CRTC in relation to the major Rogers outage that happened in July of 2022. I encourage you to read it at your leisure. But I want to draw your attention to two items. The first is this:

Root cause of the network failure. The July 2022 outage is attributed to an error in configuring the distribution routers within the Rogers IP network. Rogers staff removed the Access Control List policy filter from the configuration of the distribution routers. This consequently resulted in a flood of IP routing information into the core network routers, which triggered the outage. The core network routers allow Rogers wireline and wireless customers to access services such as voice and data. The flood of IP routing data from the distribution routers into the core routers exceeded their capacity to process the information. The core routers crashed within minutes from the time the policy filter was removed from the distribution routers configuration. When the core network routers crashed, user traffic could no longer be routed to the appropriate destination. Consequently, services such as mobile, home phone, Internet, business wireline connectivity, and 9-1-1 calling ceased functioning.

But there’s more. This also got my attention:

Deficiency in the change management process. The configuration error, which led to the removal of the policy filter from the configuration of the distribution routers, is the result of a change management oversight by Rogers staff. Rogers staff deleted the policy filter that prevented IP route flooding in an effort to clean up the configuration files of the distribution routers. The change management process, which includes audits of change parameters, failed to flag the erroneous configuration change.

That’s pretty bad that a top tier telco like Rogers had a change management process that was suspect. If I was still a customer of Rogers, I’d be rethinking whether I should be doing business with Rogers. Though I have to say that this report also says that Rogers is making improvements in this area.

There’s a couple of other items that I want to draw your attention to. Staring with this:

Limited communication among Rogers staff. Rogers staff relied on the company’s own mobile and Internet services for connectivity to communicate among themselves. When both the wireless and wireline networks failed, Rogers staff, especially critical incident management staff, were not able to communicate effectively during the early hours of the outage. Rogers had to send Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) cards from other mobile network operators to its remote sites to enable its staff with wireless connectivity to communicate with each other. The absence of sufficient alternative means of communication slowed the Rogers response to the July 2022 outage.

This is a problem. Again this report indicates that this has been addressed. But it’s pretty bad that Rogers assumed that nothing would ever happen to their network. And as a result didn’t come up with a plan to have another option for key staff to communicate.

The second item that I want to draw your attention to is this:

Separate IP core for the wireless and wireline networks. Following the outage, Rogers announced it had decided to separate the IP core network for its wireless and wireline networks. This decision entails deploying a new IP core for the wireless network, while the existing IP core would remain to serve the wireline network. Therefore, if one IP core network were affected by an outage, the other IP core network would remain unaffected and operational. 

Rogers has not yet finalized the implementation of the IP core network separation, which remains a work in progress. When implemented, separate IP core networks for the wireless and wireline networks will help to contain a failure to its respective access network and, therefore, avoid the type of catastrophic network failure experienced in the July 2022 outage, where both wireless and wireline services were unavailable due to the outage in the common core IP network. IP core network separation would improve the overall resiliency of the Rogers wireless and wireline networks.

Rogers would do well to give customers and non-customers exact timelines as to when this will get done. I say that because simply saying you’re going to do something without saying when you’re going to do it is meaningless. More on this in a bit.

One thing to keep in mind is that the CRTC has put this out there to keep Rogers honest. Specifically:

Today, the CRTC published the executive summary of the expert report completed by Xona Partners Inc. (Xona) on Rogers’ July 2022 outage. 

Based on Xona’s findings, the measures taken by Rogers have addressed the cause of the outage. Xona also made additional recommendations to Rogers to further enhance the reliability and resilience of their network, and Rogers has confirmed the implementation of all measures. 

In order to prevent future outages, Rogers must report to the Commission on: 1) whether the measures continue to effectively address reliability issues; and 2) progress made to separate the wireline and wireless core networks. The report must be provided by 4 July 2025.

We’ll see a year from now if Rogers is truly serious about making sure that their infrastructure is actually reliable for all Canadians.

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Rogers Starts Expanding 5G Network To The Rest Of Toronto’s Subway System

Posted in Commentary with tags on May 31, 2024 by itnerd

You might recall that Canadian telco Rogers bought the company that put cellular infrastructure in Toronto’s subway system. But at the same time, they all but shut out competitors like TELUS and Bell. That is until the federal government forced Rogers to open things up after a significant uptick in violence on the subway system. As part of that, Rogers had to agree to expand the network with milestones in 2025 and the second in 2026 that they had to hit. Fast forward to today. I got this in my inbox saying that they were starting the process of hitting those milestones:

The expansion work began this week in the tunnels between Kennedy and Warden stations on Line 2. Together with the TTC, Rogers is expanding the network in phases to connect the remaining 36 kilometres of unconnected tunnels. Work is being done during overnight and weekend construction windows to minimize disruption for riders.

When complete, the modernized and expanded 5G network will deliver seamless wireless coverage with mobile voice and data services in all 75 stations and tunnels across Toronto’s subway system, part of Rogers commitment to expand connectivity for Torontonians.

You know what? It’s amazing what a corporation like Rogers will do if the right levers are pulled. As in the feds forcing them to do this. I say that because I am certain that Rogers would not have done this on their own as they’ve never been and never will be that sort of company. Nor would they have opened up this network to non-Rogers customers if they were not forced to do so by the feds. So if you’re in Toronto and you suddenly get cell service in the subway system where you never had it before in the weeks and months ahead, you can thank Rogers for putting in the work to make that happen. But you should also thank the feds for forcing Rogers do the right thing as well.

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A New Outbound Calling #Scam Using Rogers Name Is Making The Rounds

Posted in Commentary with tags , on April 24, 2024 by itnerd

I’ve noted an increase in phone calls coming to my cell phone and my home phone lately. Normally I either don’t answer or punt the calls to voice mail as I suspected that these calls are scam calls. Besides, anyone who wanted to talk to me would leave a voice mail for me. But what happens almost 100% of the time is that the caller doesn’t leave a message. That suggests to me that this view of these being scam calls is likely accurate. But recently, I decided to answer the call to see what the deal was.

The call I got was from a “John Wilson” calling on behalf of Rogers. I put the name in quotes because I guarantee that it was not this caller’s real name. I say that because that’s a very Anglo-Saxon name. But the person on the other end had a pretty easy to detect South Asian accent. That’s always a red flag. Now to be fair, Canadian telcos have been known to use offshore call centres for business generation. And a lot of times those offshore call centres are located in South Asia. But I texted a contact within Rogers who was in a position to know if they have currently contracted out any business generation activities like this and they almost immediately texted back saying no.

So what “Mr. Wilson” was presenting to me was a deal that would cut the price of my “services” by $20-$30 a month. What was interesting was that he never said what “services” that I had which he could save me money on. He then asked me if I was interested in this deal. That’s when I had some fun with him and asked him point blank if he knew who I was and what Rogers services that I had. I did this because Rogers and their contractors from my experience already know who you are and what services you have with them. Thus if they can’t answer those question, it’s likely a scam. Now while this isn’t a 100% bulletproof test as evidenced by this example, it’s good enough that I rely on it. “Mr. Wilson” not only was unable to answer those questions, but he clearly got flustered as I knocked him off his script. Thus confirming that this is a scam.

I told him to have a nice day and hung up on him. But this suggests to me that there’s a threat actor or actors out there that are doing an aggressive outbound scam call campaign trying to leverage the fact that Canadians pay too much money for their telco services. And I say aggressive because I get three to five calls a day from numbers that are from the 647 area code. Now those numbers are highly likely to be spoofed. And the reason why they do that is to make you more likely to answer the call. The thing is, Rogers and their contractors show up on caller ID as Rogers. That’s not to say that a threat actor couldn’t spoof that as well. But Rogers wouldn’t use random 647 area code numbers to call from.

What’s the end game? I am not sure as I didn’t play along long enough to find out. Perhaps it’s meant to grab your credit card details or other financial details so that they can steal money from you? Perhaps if they call again, I’ll play along longer to try and find out. Then I’ll post an update to let you know. But I wanted to get this out there so that you’re aware that this scam is going on, and that you need to protect yourself by being vigilant.

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It’s Been Over A Year Since Rogers/Yahoo Broke Email For Some Rogers Customers

Posted in Commentary with tags on March 26, 2024 by itnerd

I apologize in advance if this comes across as a bit of a rant. But honestly, I am not only in disbelief that this is still an ongoing issue a year later, but I share the frustrations of my clients who are caught up in this. More on them in a bit. But the main point of this post that it was pointed out to me by a reader that it’s been over a year since the following chain of events started:

  • I first reported on issues with Rogers email, and the inability to generate app specific passwords to allow users of Rogers email to use email clients like Outlook and Thunderbird on March 7th of 2023.  
  • While this issue dragged on, there was a workaround involving using webmail. But that workaround is sub optimal to say the least. And as this issue dragged on into April of 2023, I was left with no other option than to recommend to my many clients who are affected by this to dump Rogers as their email provider.
  • By mid April 2023, Rogers has sort of admitted that there is an issue.
  • Fast forward to August 2023. It then seemed that Rogers or more accurately Yahoo who is the company behind Rogers email was rolling out OAuth to replace the need to generate app specific passwords. But the catch was that not all email clients support OAuth. To date, only the Outlook 365 email client supports this (if you have that client, this will help you to set up your Rogers email account). Which means that Rogers users using many other email clients, or those who weren’t willing to pay Microsoft every month for Office 365 were still stuck.
  • In October 2023, Rogers started to shift the blame for their email issues to Microsoft. But in January of this year, Rogers then started to blame Yahoo.

Needless to say that this is a train wreck next to a dumpster fire. And over a year later I still have a list of nine clients who can’t use the email client of their choice with Rogers email. Nine clients who have the following in common. They are all seniors who don’t feel that they are capable of being comfortable with a switch to another ISP (Bell or Teksavvy for example) or being comfortable with a switch to a Gmail or an Outlook.com. Nor are they comfortable with making the switch to Office365 as an email client because that’s going to cost them money on a monthly basis, which matters to them as they are on a fixed incomes and every dollar matters. Webmail while tolerable to get their email is not a long term solution for them as they developed processes like creating folders to file email locally before this happened. And not having that leaves them all a bit lost and confused. Thus they’re all frustrated that Rogers seemingly can’t or won’t fix this for them.

Honestly, at this point Rogers needs to do better. A company the size of Rogers simply can’t have something like this go on this long and not do its level best to make people whole again. And it doesn’t matter if it is one person, nine in my case, or a thousand. One person who can’t get their email in the manner that they want is one too many. That makes me wonder if Rogers along with Yahoo will ever fix this, or have they simply checked out and don’t care. I really hope it’s not the latter as that would reflect poorly on Rogers and Yahoo.

I’ll continue to watch this for developments and I will still be trying stuff on my end in order to make my clients whole. But frankly, given the inaction of Rogers and Yahoo, I am not holding my breath that either will come to the rescue of these people.

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Rogers Has An Opportunity To Fight Back Against Bell…. But They Likely Won’t Take It

Posted in Commentary with tags , on March 2, 2024 by itnerd

Recently, Bell was told by the CRTC that they had to open up their fibre networks to companies like Teksavvy so that in theory it would result in lower telco prices for Canadians. Bell in response acted like a two year old having a hissy fit and stopped rolling out fibre and dropping their 8 Gbps tier from being available for customers to get. Not that anyone needs speeds that fast. As a result, Bell’s decision to throw their toys out of the baby carriage has created is an opportunity for Rogers to step in and fill the void.

No. Seriously. Hear me out on this one.

Frequent readers of this blog will know that I have been extremely critical of Rogers. This organization has some serious issues that keep it from competing with Bell. Especially when it comes to the speed of their Internet offering where Bell has been putting the screws to them for years. But with Bell’s decision to hold Canadians hostage because they don’t like what the CRTC has said, Rogers could do the following to put the screws to Bell:

  • Rogers could aggressively roll out fibre to areas where Bell has seemingly abandoned: Rogers could roll into places like Barrie Ontario where Bell stopped their roll out and run fibre. And by fibre I mean fibre from end to end. Is that instant? No. But if they got shovels in the ground and put forward a date that they stuck to, Rogers would look like heroes. And they’d also gain back subscribers the they lost to Bell because cable simply doesn’t measure up to fibre.
  • Rogers could aggressively transition cable customers to fibre: If Rogers could start transitioning their cable customers to fibre, that would stop customers from defecting to Bell in areas where both companies operate and fibre on Bell is available. It would also show that Rogers recognizes that their cable offering has reached end of life and they are moving to technology that is better for their customers.
  • Rogers could leverage the one good thing about their Internet offering to beat Bell : Now I will admit that Rogers Internet isn’t the most reliable. For example they have problems keeping a DNS server live for any length of time. But Rogers does have one good thing that their Internet offering has. And that is IPv6 which is the future of the Internet and something that Rogers embraced that years ago. Bell on the other hand hasn’t for whatever reason hasn’t rolled out IPv6 on their Internet offering. And at some point very soon, it will come back to bite Bell. Rogers could simply accelerate that by having a fibre offering that leverages IPv6 and market it as “future proofing your Internet unlike the guys in blue”, then they could likely steal back market share. Because people like future proofing.

Now those bullet points are good. But the problem is that Rogers is unlikely to action these. I say that because they have to solve their stability problems. For example, their inability to keep a DNS server working that I mentioned earlier. But the real issue is that Rogers no longer seems to be the type of organization that would be willing to do any or all of this. Right now, Rogers seems willing to tread water and not push the envelope in any way. There seems to be no willingness on their part to innovate or even simply say “we can put Bell into the hurt locker if we do these things”. That seems to be a cultural thing at Rogers. And without a change in the culture at Rogers, mediocrity will rule the day. Thus they won’t leverage this opportunity that’s basically been handed to them on a silver platter.

Now I am free to be proven wrong by Rogers. And I would like to be proven wrong as Rogers doing these things might make Bell rethink their life choices and restart their fibre rollout as they might be afraid of Rogers taking market share from them. And that benefits Canadian consumers at the end of the day. So Rogers, I challenge you to put the screws to Bell. Let’s see what you’ve got.

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Bell Cuts Jobs And Cuts Fibre Speeds To Save Money

Posted in Commentary with tags on February 8, 2024 by itnerd

Bell has posted an “open letter” from their CEO Mirko Bibic about some serious cutting that Bell is doing. You can read the full letter here. But here’s the TL:DR:

  • Bell is still salty about being forced to open up their fibre networks to competitors. As a result of that they stopped rolling out fibre. But they’re now going one step further by capping speeds at 3Gbps. That means that 8Gbps that I said that nobody needed is no longer available. In fact, I checked the Bell website and found that in my area, 8Gbps is no longer an option for me to order.
  • Bell is cutting 4,800 positions which is 9% of their workforce.

All of that is bad. But it’s actually much worse. Remember when I posted a story about Bell killing The Source brand and rebranding as Best Buy Express? Well, MobileSyrup is reporting that they’re going to close locations and slash jobs as part of that. That wasn’t mentioned in the open letter. The other thing that wasn’t mentioned in the open letter was the fact that Bell is selling 45 radio stations as part of this. All of this says to me that not only is Bell not in a good place, but they’re no longer in a position to challenge Rogers. Which is something that I am sure that a bunch of people in corner offices at 333 Bloor St. E. and 1 Mount Pleasant Road which are the corporate addresses of Rogers in Toronto are happy about. I say that because whether you like or hate Bell, their push to get fibre deployed fostered competition and forced Rogers to up their game. That’s now not going to happen and consumers will pay the price for that.

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Rogers Is Now Blaming Yahoo For The Ongoing Email Disaster

Posted in Commentary with tags on January 23, 2024 by itnerd

Since March of 2023, Rogers has had an ongoing email issue that is affecting a whole lot of their users. Let me get you up to speed so that you can see what a disaster this is for Rogers customers:

  • I first reported on issues with Rogers email, and the inability to generate app specific passwords to allow users of Rogers email to use email clients like Outlook and Thunderbird on March 7th.  
  • While this issue dragged on, there is a workaround involving using webmail, but that workaround is sub optimal to say the least. And as this issue dragged on into April, I was left with no other option than to recommend to my many clients who are affected by this to dump Rogers as their email provider.
  • Rogers has sort of admitted that there is an issue. But it took them a very long time to do that.
  • It then seemed that Rogers or more accurately Yahoo was rolling out OAuth to replace the need to generate app specific passwords. But the catch was that not all email clients support OAuth. To date, only the Outlook 365 email client supports this (if you have that client, this will help you to set up your Rogers email account). Which means that Rogers users using many other email clients, or those who weren’t willing to pay Microsoft every month for Office 365 were still stuck.
  • Rogers then started to shift the blame for their email issues to Microsoft.

Well, Rogers has decided to shift the blame once again. This time they’re shifting it to Yahoo who is the company who actually provides their email services. I know this because a reader who has been following this story on my blog escalated this issue to Rogers Escalation Team and got this in response:

Hello,

I am contacting you from Rogers Technical Escalation Team regarding a concern you shared with us on our website. We appreciate your trust in our services and allowing us the opportunity to address your technical concern.

Currently, there is no update on if or when the feature to generate an app password on the Rogers Email Member Centre will be restored by Yahoo. We would like to apologize for any inconveniences. We recommend our customers to use the latest versions of Outlook that do not require the use of an app password, such as Outlook 365 or the new Outlook for Windows 11.

If you have any further questions or concerns, we recommend you contacting us at your earliest convenience using one of the following options:

Regards, 

Technical Escalation Management

He was so disgusted by this response that he flipped it to me so that I could post it to show how Rogers regards this issue. And he is now in the process of signing up for Bell Internet as he has given up on expecting Rogers to fix this.

Now to be fair, Yahoo does have to own this as this is their email platform. Which means that they need to address this. But the thing is, email addresses that are used by Rogers customers don’t say “yahoo.com”, they say “rogers.com”. Thus Rogers rather than pointing fingers at anyone but them need to dial up the right person at Yahoo and say “Look, what will take to make the app specific password functionality work? Failing that, how can we collectively get things to a place where any Rogers customer could use any email client with Rogers/Yahoo email?” Because there are going to be Rogers customers who simply can’t or won’t upgrade to the latest version of Outlook. Which means that telling said Rogers customers to simply upgrade to a newer version of Outlook or using webmail which was one of Rogers previous stock answers is simply a non-starter.

The bottom line is that we’re coming up to a year of this being an issue. And you have to wonder how much longer this will go on before there is a resolution. If there is one at all as I am starting to think that Rogers as an organization doesn’t consider this to be a priority. And if that’s the case, Rogers customers who are affected by this should be voting with their dollars just like the gentleman who sent this to me did.

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The Sad Truth Is That Canadian Telcos Don’t Respect Canadians

Posted in Commentary with tags , , on January 8, 2024 by itnerd

Not too long ago, my wife and I switched from TELUS to Freedom Mobile because to be frank, we were paying too much money with TELUS and we could save significant amounts of money with Freedom Mobile. This also highlighted the fact that Canadian telcos aren’t willing to give existing customers good deals to retain them as customers. Instead they try to offer you a “winback” deal after you’ve already switched. So when I saw this posted on CBC News, it got my attention because it shows the current state of play when it comes to the telco industry in Canada:

Even as the minister responsible admitted there aren’t enough competitive options for mobile service in Canada, another federal official said consumers can and should search for other service providers when faced with price increases.

That message — from Innovation, Science and Economic Development (ISED) Canada — came just hours after the Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne said Canadians “still pay too much and see too little competition” for cellular services.

“Customers could consider switching service providers,” an ISED Canada representative wrote Thursday, when asked for a response to price increases at Rogers Communications and reported hikes at Bell. 

Now in case you’re not aware, Rogers is going to hike prices wireless and Ignite bundles. Shaw is going to do the same thing, and Bell is rumoured to be about to do the same. The thing is that I am old enough to remember when all three telcos used to have retention departments where if you went to them, you could cut yourself a better deal if you signed on for say two years. That wasn’t ideal, but at least you had a means to save a few bucks.

But those days are over.

Like I mentioned earlier, carriers now seem to only want to focus on giving you the best deals when you’re a new customer and when you have already left. Trying to keep you as a customer is not a priority for them. That forces consumers to play this game of musical telcos if they are able to. And I say “if they are able to” because it’s easy enough to switch telcos for say your cell phone as it’s simple to port a number from one telco to another. But dumping Rogers Internet for Bell Internet for example is a bit more of an exercise as you’ve got to get a tech in to install the service, and you might have your email tied to your old carrier, which by the way you shouldn’t ever do. That makes the process a non-trivial exercise. And the cynic in me says that telcos are to some degree or another counting on that to keep you as a customer and paying more as a result.

The fact that telcos these days are effectively saying “go ahead and leave, we don’t care” and then offering you a “winback” offer days after you’ve left says to me that telcos don’t respect you as a customer. I say that because they are more interested in having you show up as a new customer in the quarterly stats if they go the “winback” offer route as you’ve quit and then you’ve come back. And it also doesn’t affect their “churn” rate which is the amount of people who leave a carrier in a given quarter. Because you’ve left and come back which means it evens out at the end of the day. None of that sounds like a business who respects their customers. And the “big 3” telcos are all guilty of doing this.

While I don’t think that this will happen anytime soon, one of the “big 3” needs to change their view of the universe and start to see their customers as fellow Canadians. As in their friends or neighbours who have challenges with the cost of living these days and adjust their business practices to reflect that. For example working with their customers to make their telco bills more affordable if they are approached by their customers to do just that. Because if one of the “big 3” telcos did that, the other two will be forced to follow suit because they all follow each other in lockstep. But like I said earlier, I don’t think that would happen anytime soon because the only thing that Canadian telcos appear to care about is how much money they can extract from you until you tap out and switch telcos. Assuming you’re able to. And then they may care about bringing you back into the fold. It’s a sad state of play and says a lot about how Bell, Rogers, and TELUS view you.

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