To: [email protected]

From: KGS

Date: August 10, 2002 1:31 PM

Subject: Roder Rants

Here's an early one from the first day Rogers came to install the cable and modem for the computer (I had already installed my LAN card and configured the connection)

"I had cancelled 2 appointments that were going to net me $180 because Rogers could NOT tell me what time of day that the installer was going to come--and as I had no one else who could wait for him I had to postpone the work.  One of the jobs never did happen again so those $ could (theoretically) be added to the cost of my high speed from Rogers. when the installer came (just before 5 P.M.)  I asked him if he carried a cell phone.  He replied that he carried his own--and that Rogers did NOT provide the installers with cellphones.  I said that I found this remarkable (as well as Rogers' policy of not giving the customer a 'ball-park' estimate of the time the installer would show up.  He agreed, spent his half hour and was gone.  Later I sent an email to Rogers chiding them for calling themselves a 'Communications' company when they were so inefficient at communicating with their customers.  This email went unanswered"

With the demise of the the Excite@Home network we have had Rogers succumb to a Shaw buyout in western Canada--so are now dealing with THEIR ineptitudes--I have nearly as many juicy stories of incompetence of SHAW's--though I must grudgingly admit that their overall service has been a lot better (this may be due to the fact that, especially in Vancouver, B.C., Rogers blazed the origional trail of the high-speed cable network--a process that seemed to be the equivelant of constantly increasing the traffic and  then fixing whatever components failed, rather than building the network for the amount of traffic that would use it in the FIRST place.  Thus we had CONSTANT failures and interruptions in the 1st 2 years.

I also have several tales of dishonesty and bad business practices committed by Rogers and other cable providers in the central Alberta area.

Ken

IhateROGERS.ca Comments

So ROGERS sucked in the West coast also huh? At least they are consistent, you have to give them that much if nothing else.

To: [email protected]

From: Mike

Date: August 13, 2002 10:02 PM

Subject: your ground installation picture

I’ll let you in on a secret as to why that ground got done the way it did.

First and foremost, the guy probably new what he was doing, he just didn’t give a flying fuck though … pardon the french.

You see, I’m a cable technician myself and I work for a contractor of Rogers. I take more pride in my work then what’s displayed on your website and would never do something so blatantly stupid but that’s not the point, my point is this …

Rogers being the cheap bastards they are, don’t pay the contracting company any money for putting grounds on and in turn the contracting company doesn’t pay their employees for doing it either.

As you probably know, people in general like to get paid for the work they do, so when they’re told they must do it and do it for no money, then it gets done in the fashion that’s displayed on your website.

Just a little side note … in case you were under the mistaken impression that cable technicians are paid hourly or salary.

WE AREN’T.

Thanks for your time,

Ciao

Mike

IhateROGERS.ca Comments

I of course have no way to verify if in fact this submission is from an actual ROGERS technician. And to tell you the truth, this submission makes very little sense to me. If someone can shed some light on this topic, I would welcome it.

To: [email protected]

From: bookworm

Date: August 24, 2002 7:25 PM

Subject: I agree rogers sucks

i agree rogers sucks i mean their digital pictures always pixilate more than starchoice. and rogers i bet is so much more expensive. keep up the work on your page and please do tv ads about your website i haterogers.ca i back you up on how much rogers sucks even their rogers@home their crap the e mail kept going down.

IhateROGERS.ca Comments

I would love to do a TV commercial for this site. Unfortunately, I don’t generate any income (yet). I am considering selling t-shirts, mousepads and baseball hats with the ihateROGERS message, but at present I’m sticking to cost free mediums of advertising. However, donations are most certainly welcome.

To: [email protected]

From: Saphier

Date: August 26, 2002 1:22 PM

Subject: Rogers hate

First off, the formalities:
Great site, it has a nice point to show those Rogers hogs to show how much people really dispise Rogers.

Now that's over with:
I started with a nice company for cable.. that company was Shaw. They were great. Great speeds, great pings to many servers, great tech support (I miss that), and above all: they were honest to their customers about changes and technical problems in their servers. When they announced that Rogers High Speed Internet would be taking over their operations and that they would be moving to BC, I thought: no big deal, I'm sure since Rogers charges more than Shaw, their service would
be a bit, if not a lot better. So I went around my business, doing my end of the job for the conversion between the ISP, and after, when everything is finished and i was offically off of Shaw and on Rogers, I launched my favourite game, Quake 2, and logged on to a server that gave me 30-40s pings. I hit X to show the score. My ping doubled. It was now in the 80-100s range. Now, i'm just thinking that this might be the fact that Rogers is still flushing out some bugs and such in their newly acquired servers, but the problem only got worse, and my ping rose some more, to the 100-120 range. Finally, it got so bad that I couldn't even play. I was getting dialup like ping times on a high speed connection (200 - 300s pings). Now, I just surf the web, and other non-internet
excessive things, but online gaming is definitely out of the question. Well, there goes one gurantee that shaw had. At least my downloads were still fast.

That was true, but they, too, slowly got worse, from what was the luxury 120+ k/s from Shaw turned into 10-30k/s from Rogers. I cringe everytime I have to download or am interested in downloading a larger than 50 meg file.

Then came the dreaded Rogers conversion, I had lost my email password temporarily in the conversion (not because I didn't write it down, oh no, it was because they set it to a "temporary default password"), which, to this day, i still use, partially because their password changing websites have not let any of my user accounts logon, and the last time I tried inquiring tech support, I hung up after around 45 minutes of being on hold, waste of time.

Ah, then one day out of nowhere, my speeds were BLAZING fast. But guess what: the internet connection was unstable! So after some tests and random pings I concluded: Of course my speeds would be blazing fast, half the users on that node were being disconnected or are already
disconnected when someone else manages to reconnect to the server! So, those were the speeds on a noncongested server (around the Finch and Warden area). Of course, what good was blazing speed if I didn't have the longtivity or connectivity to use it? Sure, I can play my online games now, but in between matches or even during matches I would get kicked off, and it would take anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes to get back on. I phone tech support, but as many of you already know and have experienced, they dodged, denied and deflected the acqusations. "It is probably your computer's problem. Have you tried formatting?" .. now I'm a very gentle person, and was luckily able to hold on and restraint my overbearing urge to kill the tech support person vocally. But he was only doing his job. I tried calling a few more times, and got a tech support person that seem to acctually be helpful. He suggested many interesting ways to repair the connectivity, and put me on hold for around 5 minutes to check the network status. Where he acctually told me that there was indeed, a problem, and that he would be grateful if I recorded the times where I disconnected and how long it took me to reconnect. So I complied and I got a weeks credit for my trouble. That
kind of service hasn't been experienced for awhile. Satisfied, I waited it out and in a few weeks, my connection was back to the slow, but stable, state it had been in before.

To this day, I'm still there, with no major problems, but half a days downtime every week, usually.

Whew. That was my Rogers HS experience anyways.

So one day I have a bunch of friends over, playing some games, and we decided to go to our local Rogers video to rent a four player game. Unfortunately, none of the 3 cards my friends had worked. They had put the games we took out into a little bin, which probably ment it was to be reshelved. So my parents came home, we went to Rogers and my dad registered a new card. This was around 30 minutes after the whole incident. I looked at the shelf, and saw that Twisted Metal Black wasn't
even there. So I figure that it hasn't been reshelfed yet and asked a Rogers Video guy about it. He doesn't even check the bin and says that if it wasn't on the shelf, they didn't have it. Again I resisted the urge to pummel this guy to the ground verbally.

I haven't visited the Rogers store since.

So to conclude:
Rogers is one big giant that doesn't seem to care much about it's customers, and I hope that this fact one day recoils back at them and they finally realize: maybe we should've listened to our customers.

Anyways, thanks for you time and reading my rant, I certainly feel a lot better now.

-- Rui

IhateROGERS.ca Comments

You know, I’m like a shrink. For people feeling angry and looking for a place to vent, I’m here. I enjoy providing an outlet for frustration and sometimes putting pen to paper (so to speak) is just what you need. ROGERS should be thankful that I field so many of their complaints, don’t you think?

To: [email protected]

From: Darryl O.

Date: August 27, 2002 9:59 AM

Subject: Why I hate Rogers

I had the misfortune of using Roger's High Speed Internet, while I had many issues with the service being unavailable, it was also time that I moved. So in my planning, I emailed the Rogers staff asking what kind of charges would be involved with transferring my existing services (Cable and
Internet) to my new home.  They told me there was nothing that they could do, so I asked them if they would match Bell Canada's offer of 1 free month and free installation.  The email that was sent back to me said that they would indeed match that offer.

So I moved, and I still have the emails kicking around and sure enough I get billed for the installation and the first month service.  I email the customer support attaching the previous emails indicating that I was to have free installation and 1 month free service.  They email me back telling me that they cannot honour that agreement.  I called management and they tell me that they cannot honour that agreement.  Infuriated that they screwed me for $80, I call Bell to find that service is not available in my area yet but will be within 2 months.  That means spending 2 months with Rogers Internet and having to get my $80 back.  I try to be polite, and I email the customer support and let them know that the choice is for them to make, I will either be getting an $80 credit back on my account or I will be bothering them every day until I can leave them.  I wrote a perl script that I left running on my server which pinged yahoo.com and microsoft.com, and when both were unavailable it would log the time so I could track downtime.

The last 2 months with Rogers was probably the most delightful time I had with Rogers. Determined to get value of my $80, I email them every day asking them for my $80 credit, and then I call them after work.  It takes up a substantial amount of my time.  I emailed them my weekly logs showing
downtime, where I had the opportunity to show them that 1 week I had more than 40 hours of downtime.  I explained that that kind of service was not what I was paying for and that they should extend my $80 credit to $100 since the uptime that I had was while I was away at work, and that paying for a service that I could never use wasn't my idea of spending wisely.

I never got my money from Rogers, they wouldn't even credit me for the incredible amounts of downtime that I experienced with them.  DSL became available in my area and I snatched that up right away.  I had to return Rogers modem, but still felt they owed me money, and that is why when I returned the modem I wrote on the shiny metal surface of my Alcatel modem. Rogers owes me a free month and free installation in black magic marker. They called and asked me to pay for the replacement of the modem, but I let them know that it wasn't my modem, it wasn't my marker and that when we cancel out what we would owe each other that it all balances out, but did tell them that as soon as the credit I was owed was posted to my account that I would pay for the modem.  I never heard from them again, and my DSL works better than what Rogers did.  Not that Roger's didn't work well, when it was up and available it worked great, unforunately it wasn't up enough.

Darryl

IhateROGERS.ca Comments

Well I’m glad you concocted a plan to alleviate frustration. I know when I reserved this domain name I felt great. I don’t support vandalism, but I can’t help but laugh at how you handled the situation and I can certainly relate to spending personal time trying to "get even".

To: [email protected]

From: Andrew Cz.

Date: August 27, 2002 9:48 PM

Subject: ROGERS Monkeys!

Hello,

I'm a proud EX-ROGERS customer today.  I live in the Toronto region.  We've all heard the horror stories that rogers internet guarantees...unfortunately, there is no GREAT ALTERNATIVE!

I bet that nobody in the Toronto or Ontario area has found an ISP that offers at least 300 KB/s downloading and 45 KB/s uploading (yes, kilobytes, the actual speeds that Internet Explorer or most FTP programs tell you when transferring data) for under $60 (the way Rogers @ Home used to give us).  If you have found one like it or even better, I'd be glad to hear about it.

Sure, there are many other internet service providers out there that promise you the world but in reality, you're not getting what's really advertised.  For example, have you noticed that many of the ISP sites post their speeds as "UP TO x/Mbs"???  For example, "Up to 3.0Mbs download and 640Kbps upload" (many don't even tell you the upload speed since they don't believe we care...and most probably don't).  We all know what UP TO really means...Want a real world example? Ok...here's one from www.egate.net - "DSL Connection Services up to 3 megabits in speed."  Notice they don't even tell you what upload/downloads speeds those are.  Are we to call every single ISP to find out all the right answers to such questions? It just tells you that they think we're idiots! They think that as long as they tell us what we want to hear then it's good business.  Of couse, it's up to us to read the fine print.  But there are more techies out there today than ever before and no half-intelligent techie will go for such bull**** deals (pay more money for less bandwidth, etc!).

What I really hate about Rogers is that there really, still, isn't another internet service provider that gives you better upload and download speeds, including the monthly transfer amount, for the same money or less.  Only thing that exists that is better than Rogers is customer service and especially technical support because I assure you there is NOTHING worse than Rogers in that department!  There's just not enough competition though.  The only thing is, maybe, Sympatico Ultra which offers 3.0Mbs downloading and 640Mbs uploading but even that is $70/month! 

Conclusion: If you want better upload/download speeds you're going to have to fork out more than the already expensive monthly rate!

Oh, and I hope rogers completely dies, goes bankcrupt, gets sued or simply disappears from the ISP competition..it slowly already is...but they probably won't until everyone learns how much Rogers is ripping them off...cutting down the speeds while raising the prices and only half-informing you (they tell you about the price hike but don't tell you that we're going to reduce your bandwidth even more)!!!!!!

ANDREW CZ.

IhateROGERS.ca Comments

Now that’s what I call a f***ing RANT!

To: [email protected]

From: Ronen K.

Date: August 28, 2002 8:23 AM

Subject:

Hi,

I've never been a rogers internet customer, and from all the horror stories I read here, you can see why.  I know many people who despite their knowledge of computers, are treated like idiots by a Canadian version of Microsoft (own TV, radio, blue jays, and soon, your soul), with 'tech support' who neither tech or support.

I also wanted to say that the 'alternative', I'm referring to Sympatico here, isn't that great also.  First, they recently put the download cap. 5GB on both download and upload limit per month.  Of course, they 'SAY' they informed everyone, but I didn't receive anything.  I got penalized $8 per GB
over, and I had 10GB worth.  So my bill was around $100. 

Sympatico also raised their prices, and I had my share of problems with them as well, although not nearly as traumatizing as the stories here.

I'm currently with a 'no name' DSL provider and I urge everyone to use the small companies.  If you buy the high speed modem (why pay $10 rental fee?), you only pay around $30 a month (from the research I've done).  The links on this site for the alternatives are great.

Just a rant,

RK

IhateROGERS.ca Comments

I admire that you have never been a ROGERS Internet customer and I agree with you 100% concerning consumers supporting smaller companies for these services. It makes no sense to choose an option that lacks in all aspects. The competition is plentiful and choosing ROGERS without doing your homework is insane.