To: [email protected]

From: HiVolt

Date: July 8, 2002 12:18 PM

Subject: I hate Rogers even more now than ever before!

Hi. I heard about this site on the MOJO AM640 radio station, and I decided to post a rant of my own. Well, I too have some horror stories, they are mostly about the Rogers Hi-Speed Internet on Cable. First off, let me say that I live in Scarborough, Ontario, an area formerly serviced by Shaw Cable. When I first signed up for high speed internet, it was offered by Shaw Cable, it was called "Shaw Wave", back in mid 1998. I phoned, talked to a service rep, 5 days later the installer showed up, everything was up & running in less than 30 minutes. Since that time, I have not had any problems with my Internet until Shaw Cable stopped servicing my area in December 2000, and Rogers Cable took the service over. This is where the horror starts. 

Right off the bat, when Rogers took over the service, they immediately reduced the speeds for both download and upload speeds, from what Shaw offered for the same $39.95. Speeds with Shaw were 10mbps download, 1mbps upload. Speeds when Rogers reduced the speed were 3mbps download, 384kbps or 0.384mbps upload. So you can see, they reduced the speed by 3x. While that ticked me off, It didnt really bother me that much down the road, it was still pretty darn fast. But now is where the service & reliability problems start. The service would start cutting off at random times, slowing down to a crawl, the cablemodem flashing red lights like a christmas tree, what have you.  Endless hours on hold to reach clueless tech support weenies, their supervisor's supervisor, etc, very rarely led to solving the problem. Almost every time they would make me do a plethora of useless tasks such as rebooting my computer, reinstalling my TCP/IP stack, blah, all the stuff that I already learned to do over the years from having cable internet and knowing how it works. I always told them that I know how this stuff works, and dont put me thru this bulls**t every time, they just kept going on how its their procedure, etc. No wonder it takes 30+ minutes getting tech support, when these monkeys recite to you pages upon pages from their procedure manuals!!! Rogers was then affiliated with @Home, a US based content provider who was in charge of providing the rich multimedia content, email and newsgroups for the Rogers customers. While thats all nice and dandy, it was nothing but a nightmare. The Email service was terrible, I was receiving unsolicited spam on FRESHLY created accounts, because that company would sell their e-mail lists to marketing companies. About half the time I had connectivity problems (no internet connection), Rogers would send "trouble tickets" to @Home in the US, and you can just imagine where those ended up. Yup, vanished in thin air. Every time I called back, I was given the run around about how the technicians in the US were unable to resolve the problem, or that they havent received the trouble ticket, or what have you. If you partner up with an incompetent company in the United States, dont blame me. And half of that is bull anyway, because all the network equipment is here locally, to provide the customers with internet. How would a company in the US know why my modem is offline? It could be a cable issue down the road because some idiot decided to dig up his yard (yup it happened here) or weather problems, etc.

At one point in time during mid 2001, my internet has gone down for a week, and their tech weenies were not able to fix anything, I had waited another 3 weeks, yes THREE weeks for a "network specialist" to come down to my house, and he couldn't figure it out. Finally some braindead monkey at Rogers comes up with this idea. Let's totally erase your entire account, and re-create it, that will re-set the authentication sequence in the modem, and you'll be back on track. At that point in time, I just said do whatever the hell you want. So they did, and things still didnt work. I had given up on this bull, I was already thinking of changing providers to Bell Sympatico HSE at that time. But about a week later, the modem magically came back online, and things were up and running. I was happy, finally after more than a month of outage and using dialup, I was back on high speed. My smile fell off my face when I received my bill. I had received TWO bills. One was the bill I always got, and now this new bill, for the account they re-created. And the new bill also included extra setup fees ($100), and extra charges because there was no basic cable service on the account, $10 I think. I was outraged. And to add to the insult, on my original bill, I hadn't even received ANY CREDIT for the month+ of downtime, they just expected me to pay them $40+ for no freakin service. So I call the friendly people at the customer service. At first, they tell me that I have TWO cablemodems in my house. I say to the lady, I only have one, and i'm looking right at it. After explaing what happened, she speaks to her supervisor, then I talk to the supervisor, and he instructs me not to pay my original bill, because that's credit for the downtime. He said the original account will be closed. And that I shouldn't pay the new bill either, because its incorrect with all the additional charges. Next month I should only receive one bill with the proper amounts due. I thought the problem was rectified. How wrong I was. Next month, I get the same two bills, with an extra $40 tacked onto each one of them, along with penalties for non payment on time. I was furious, called Rogers and started flaming the first person that i got a hold of. I had over $300 worth of bills here and not one cent I should have owed! They promised to fix everything. A week later, a cable guy shows up at my door and has a service order to disconnect my cable. I told him to get the F!@# off my yard, and he did. I scared the poor dude. Two days later after I come from work, I get a nice notice in the mailbox that my service has been cut for non payment, and I have Rogers has referred me to a collection agency to collect the money I owe. Now I was totally pissed. Not only did I not have BOTH cable tv and internet now, but Rogers now has made a blatant attempt to screw up my credit rating, and everyone knows how important that is in this bloody country.  I took the letter, the bills, and the cablemodem to a rogers video outlet where they also do billing and other stuff. I was there screaming and foaming at my mouth. The poor lady nearly shriveled up and died from all the insults i hurled at Rogers. She phoned a local supervisor to drive down to the store to talk to me. He came down in about an hour. This is the first time I spoke to a competent person at Rogers. The man was knowledgable, with proper authority to fix everything. He dispatched a truck to my house the same day to reconnect the cable, fixed all the accounting problems, apologized, and gave me a 4 months free credit, applied right there on the spot, and I was given a printout of my new bill, etc, which now had credit on it. So after losing half the hair on my head, the situation was resolved after 3 months of nothing but pure bulls**t.

I have gone thru some connection problems since then, but they were minor on the scale compared to that one above. But now comes April 2002. I receive a note in the mail with my bill, that Rogers will be increasing the monthly fee by $5, to accomodate cablemodem rental. All this time I had the cablemodem and they didnt care, now they want to charge for it? Oh well, its only $5 I say. So the bill has gone up from $39.95 to $44.95. Surprise surprise though, on the next month's bill, the SERVICE fee is listed as $44.95, and the cablemodem rental says $0, with this in brackets beside it (cableodem rental normally $15.15) or something to that effect. What the heck? They had just blatantly lied to the customers about the modem fee! I am in no doubt that they will do the same thing down the road again.

Now comes mid June 2002. My service works great, for some oddball reason, fast, reliable, etc. But one day, I come back from work and I run a speed test. To my surprise, my speeds are exactly HALF what I was getting just a day before. I thought its some software error. But then I recall reading on a broadband forum that some users have had their speeds reduced. So i investigate the problem a little more, and yes, it was true! My area had just been speed throttled. The previous speeds were 3mbit download and 384kbps upload. It is now 1.5mbit download and 192kbps upload, and the speed tests I've done from various sources and various times of the day confirm that. I call Rogers, and the tech says that they've done no such thing. I just roll my eyes and hang up, because there's no point of me wasting my breath with these monkeys. I called a couple days later, and one poor techie slipped his tongue and he said that the area where I live has just had two nodes combined into one, and the speed has indeed been reduced. He said my area had 50 cablemodems, now it has 101. Gee how is that for nice service change. And all of this, without ANY notice from Rogers on the speed level change. Just pure and total ignorance. I don't know WHY I am still with these people. Further investigation on the broadband forums, I found other users were given the same runaround and excuses... Rogers says "Its an evolution of service, by lowering the speeds we will give everyone better service". Tell me, someone with even half a brain, HOW THE HECK IS THAT LOGICAL? Ugh, i'm just fed up. I've acquired a DSL modem, and I'm currently waiting to see what happens with the looming monthly transfer quotas that Rogers will be imposing within the upcoming months. If they're unreasonable, I'm gone. On this and other issues, drop in on these links:

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/ilec,bc    - Canadian Broadband Forum

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/rogers    - Rogers Forum

Well, I don't know if this has been the biggest rant submitted, but its probably up there..

Sincerely,

Frustrated Rogers Bill Payer

Martin K.

IhateROGERS.ca Comments

Martin, this is presently the largest rant and I hope everyone reads it word for word. Unfortunately, there are too many big words in there for anyone from ROGERS to read it, but what can you do? I also want to commend you on your use of the words, "monkeys" & "weenies". That pretty much covers EVERYONE employed by ROGERS, however it is a bit of an insult to monkeys & weenies, but again — what can you do?

From: the-vin-man

Date: July 8, 2002 1:00 PM

Subject: ROGERS

…The rogers cable boxes  on this building has locking doors, which are often left open to flap in the wind. They cost a lot of money to install and break from the wind.  The tech leave them open.  This alone , the waste of money repairing the boxes on various apartment buildings is large, thus leading to higher operating expenses. I wrote John Tory twice and never recieved a response.  It take two men by the way to change a box and in a big job. They installed a ney type of box last year(6-8 boxes on building) and it has two doors, and I can tell you they have left the doors open on one of them right now.

Mike

IhateROGERS.ca Comments

Mike, I wish I could say I was surprised, but I’m not. ROGERS installers and technicians are regulated by ROGERS. The blind leading the blind.

To: [email protected]

From: Adam O.

Date: July 8, 2002 2:46 PM

Subject:

I'm glad to hear that I'm not the only one experiencing grief with Rogers.

I had no idea everybody at Rogers was this incompetent, until I recently moved into a new home..

I arranged for my HiSpeed (hah) service to be disconnected at midnight the Friday before my Saturday move.   Somebody at Rogers decided that Wednesday night would be better for them.  No big deal.. I figured I can live without it for a couple of days.

I moved on the Saturday, (Canada Day weekend) expecting everything to be connected, and up and running.  My cable television was up and running (which I never watch anyway, as I have a satellite dish), but my broadband connection was not.  As I work from home regularly, I called Rogers right away, and asked them to send out a technician to diagnose and repair the problem (after spending the requisite hour on the phone with one of their support drones, performing mundane tests that merely confirmed what I had told them (I'm a systems engineer, so I'm not what you would consider technically inept).

So, they agreed to send someone out on the holiday Monday - at 8am..  I had to cut my long weekend short, and return from out of town, to meet the cable guy, who I assumed was there to fix the problem.  Turns out, they sent a technician, who ran a battery of tests, only to confirm that yes, something was indeed wrong, and a maintenance call had to be scheduled.  I resisted the urge to strangle the tech, as he was merely doing his job.  He said he would send an email to the maintenance department, and that it typically takes between 24-48 hours for the crew to come out.  Again.. an inconvenience, but I figured it wouldn't kill me.  Well.. 24-48 hours came and passed, and nobody called, came by, or fixed anything.

After speaking to half the staff at Rogers during the entire week, and yelling at half of the senior managers, of whom only ONE returned my call (Danroy, rep# 2008 - thank you), they agreed to send out a maintenance crew to fix the problem on Sunday, between 2-5pm.   Sooo - another beautiful summer weekend shot, sitting around waiting for the cable guy.  He did show up, about an hour early, and instead of fixing the problem, came in and starting running the same tests that the tech the week before had run.  Guess what - he too came to the same conclusion, that there was a problem, and a maintenance crew would have to be dispatched.  So.. two weekends in a row waiting for a solution to this problem, and nothing has been resolved.  I called Rogers yet again, demanding that someone be sent out, and that I wanted the problem fixed within the time window that they had given me - before 5pm Sunday.  After getting bounced from one department to another, and spending over 2 hours on my cellular phone, which Rogers will probably bill me for, someone with a brain finally picked up the phone, and told me that maintenance crews don't even work on Sundays!! 

So..  it seems that nobody at Rogers actually reads the notes that technicians submit on their reports..  When I asked one of (many) reps that I spoke to, if she could see the account call history, she told me she could, and was surprised that a technician was scheduled, instead of a maintenance call..

I am still waiting for the problem to be fixed, but I'm not very pleased.. I am looking into alternatives, and will probably cancel each and every Rogers service that I currently subscribe to - broadband, cellular phone, cable television, and will also boycott any periodicals that they are affiliated with, and recommend that my friends, colleagues, clients all do the same.  I work in the IT industry, and am asked daily for my recommendation for a broadband provider, which until today, was Rogers.  Never again. 

Adam O., CNS, Systems Engineer

IhateROGERS.ca Comments

Adam, I am not surprised with the treatment you received or with the way things were handled in general by ROGERS. I do have one problem with your story though. You claim you spoke to someone at ROGERS with a brain? A human brain? I had a number of conversations with ROGERS employees and often heard an echo on the line which I assumed was the connection. It was actually caused by the empty head of the person I had the misfortune of speaking with.

To: [email protected]

From: Evil Badger

Date: July 8, 2002 3:13 PM

Subject: just some regular comments

hi

Just before you read all this the person emailing you is a teen so you can expect bad grammar and stuff lol.

Today as i was listening to mojo radio i heard you on air atleast if that was the real person it was you lol. I went on the site you talked about and now i amazed. The site looks like it was done by a pro(well atleast i think that). I have never had much problems with rogers theres one i can remember. I went to the video store when me and my family went to pay for the videos
it took sooooo long to get out from there. They couldn't scan it right they had to keep on scanning then later as we walked out the alarm went off so we had to redo the process but after looking through your sites mines is the smallest problem possible compare to many more. I am currently hooked up with sympatico i was thinking my internet is a bit slow or you cant download
in seconds(which is true those liars!) But there are more problems with rogers i guess since they also run a internet service plus a cable. Im picturing the possiblitys with rogers should be known to all. When looking at that picture of how they installed whatever that was and knowing how
dangerous rogers is a bad service and im glad i visited your site since i was planning on buying a cell phone plan there. I love your site and if i find a friend connected using or any products of rogers ill make sure they check your site first ;)

Samantha

IhateROGERS.ca Comments

Samantha, grammar, shmammar - I understood your problem perfectly. ROGERS can’t even handle the simple renting of a video. Although I’m sure that’s not always the case — I’m glad you’ve realized there are alternatives to the services offered by ROGERS. STOP renting their videos and support the smaller independent stores they’ll bend over backwards to make you happy. Who knows, maybe you’ll win the FREE FIDO phone