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
Ill 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 didnt give a
flying fuck though
pardon the french.
You see, Im a cable technician
myself and I work for a contractor of Rogers. I take more
pride in my work then whats displayed on your website
and would never do something so blatantly stupid but thats
not the point, my point is this
Rogers being the cheap bastards
they are, dont pay the contracting company any money
for putting grounds on and in turn the contracting company
doesnt 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
theyre told they must do it and do it for no money,
then it gets done in the fashion thats 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 ARENT.
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 dont generate
any income (yet). I am considering selling t-shirts, mousepads
and baseball hats with the ihateROGERS message, but at present
Im 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, Im like
a shrink. For people feeling angry and looking for a place
to vent, Im 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, dont 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 Im glad you concocted
a plan to alleviate frustration. I know when I reserved this
domain name I felt great. I dont support vandalism,
but I cant 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 thats 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.
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