Rogers Cable can suck my <expletive>.
We get (got?) all our home connectivity services through Rogers. This means 2 cell phones, 1 Digital Cable, 1 “Express” Cable Internet (10Mbps), and 1 home phone. We are trying to ditch Rogers because what they’re actually sucking is our money. Out of us. Or our bank accounts. Which REALLY sucks.
The straw that broke the camel’s back was the most recent letter we got from them. “Most Recent” because it is the second such letter. The first one came a year ago, saying (paraphrased), “If you would like to continue to receive your Better Choice Bundle discount, you need to commit to 2 years.” (I remember them saying 3, but Rogers insists it has always been only 2, so I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt). On the phone and through no fewer than 3 conversations, I essentially told them, “Piss off. No, sir, I will brook this a moment longer, sir.” Which was a lie, because they held onto me for another year when someone stepped up and said, “We’ll grandfather your existing arrangement for another year.”
But this year, as they hinted, we got another letter saying the same thing. “If we do not receive a commitment by October XX, you will no longer receive your discount.”
What.
The.
F***.
This is a bad way of doing business. It’s an especially bad way of doing business when the client on the other end has already registered displeasure at that kind of treatment (not that I expected it to be recorded and tracked or anything; that would require amazing and attentive customer service, har har). The best thing they could have done is say, “Wow, gee-whillikers,” (is that how you spell that?) “thanks for sticking with us long enough to even HAVE an arrangement that needs to be grandfathered. Why don’t you go ahead and keep it? Good on ya!” That wouldn’t have guaranteed our business (price is climbing all the time), but it would have prevented me from firing up a web browser (ironic, eh?) and looking for the alternatives.
In any event, I’m under no delusions. The alternatives just aren’t typically as good (though the technical support I got from Dave at CIA was actually the best I’ve had in a LONG time. I wanted to buy Dave a freakin’ beer afterwards). But are the alternatives “good enough” to keep our family happy? We’ll see.
We’re not making drastic changes, between some reductions in our cell phone (we would go to pay-as-you-go, except that ROGERS wants to exchange termination for either our 6-month old child, or $520, our choice) and our cable bill (switching to digital basic from digital VIP), plus changing up phone/internet providers, we’re going to save roughly $50-$60/mo. That’s Cole’s education fund. My child’s education, or some overpriced luxury services? Let me ponder… Whoops, now that I’ve pondered, I’m about ready to cancel Cable, too!
In any event, since the cell phones and cable are going to be relatively the same in terms of quality, there are two unknown commodities that we’ll be keeping an eye on as we switch over: Internet and Land Phone
Unknown Commodity 1: Internet
We’re creatures of comfort. Tonight is the first night I got my ADSL connected and already I see problems. ADSL just isn’t as “maintenance-free always-on” as cable is. It’s connection-based which means at SOME point in time we’ll need to reestablish our connections by resetting the modems, re-authenticating or SOMETHING. I dunno exactly what, but SOMETHING will mess us up. You’ll see. 
Partial evidence is that I had to call tech support… never had to do that with Rogers… hook coax into the modem, plug modem into router, plug computer into router… done. Here, there was some messing about trying to register our computer on the Cybersurf system. It took tech support. (But the guys I dealt with were awesome, which is more than I can say for Rogers’ tech folks).
After successfully setting the up the connection direct from my computer, I stupidly tried to include my router into the mix. Yes, the cables are all correct. No, it didn’t work. The router is supposed to grab an IP from the VoIP adapter, but for some reason it didn’t. Actually……….. that might be an OpenDNS issue………
In terms of speed, Rogers doesn’t always provide what they advertise, but I have had some full 10Mbps nights. And it hardly ever goes down. That said, as I was preparing this blog post, I had quite the interesting test results:
Cybersurf:
That’s a full 1.5 Mb less than the advertised speed (but let’s just call it 1Mb to be realistic). In theory, only just above a third what we are supposedly (and in truth, are often) enjoying with Rogers.
Rogers isn’t cancelled yet, so I ran a speed test there, too. I’ve done this before with 10Mbps results. But tonight:
That’s even slower than Cybersurf. Crazy! I ran the tests several times, with similar results (some Cybersurf ones better, some Rogers ones even worse); these were fairly representative and use the same host server for the test.
A bit of a head-scratcher. I’ll chalk it up to coincidence, because I know for sure that I’ve achieved 9-10Mbps quite regularly with Rogers. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt for providing better (certainly easier to configure) internet. But is it worth the price they charge? I personally don’t think so. 60GB download caps are lame, too, when much of the world is starting to watch all kinds of streaming media on the internet (hi def streams on CTV.ca… helloooo…), as well as downloading things like Linux DVD images (5GB each time you want to try a new distro). Any kind of limit is wack. 60GB is extra-wack. Wiggity-wiggity-wiggity-wack even. The trade-off with the CIA ADSL is that there’s no usage cap (when they introduce cable, there will be, however).
Unknown Commodity 2: Land Phone
This one is going to be interesting. The sound quality is already noticeably worse, as there is a hiss quite obvious on the dialtone. We’ll see what happens when we actually make a phone call.
The benefits will be a crap-bucket of features… one of which I’m sceptical about (voicemail sent to email), and several of which should have been free add-ons from Rogers since a decade ago (value-add, folks…) like caller ID. Another benefit is free LD calling to most major centres in Canada.
The drawbacks will be the reliance on the untested ADSL connection, lower sound quality, possibly worse latency (they say it’s good, but we’ll see…), and voicemail-to-email.
We’ll see how it goes. If I’m feeling energetic, I’ll report back with some ACTUAL prices instead of just guesses from off the top of my head…
In any event, all this to say…. I’m inspired to start trimming the fat on our services and luxuries. Why buy Becel margarine, when you can buy Celeb (Alie would remind me, ‘because you thought the Celeb had a wacky consistency). No more 10-year old smoked cheddar, there’s Cheez-Whiz instead. No more Levi’s denim, I’m switching to Wrangler.
I’ll let you know how the phone works out.
