Ooh, they have the Internet on computers now!
Posted 5 months ago at 19:30. 1 comment
Sorry I haven’t written much in the past month. Could you even tell? Anyway, there’s a reason.
I’m pretty reliant on an internet connection. I work from home, I have an IP phone for work, I have a Tivo that needs to talk to the internet to get its program data, I have a son that loves to watch old Sesame Street clips on YouTube…etc, etc. We had been connected via Bell at the old house. The service was decent, but recently we’d started having problems with random charges or long distance packages being added to our bill without our consent. As the base monthly cost crept up, we resolved to go with something new and non-Bell when we moved. (Aside: we are, in fact, all moved now, and the old house has been sold. More on that later.)
I did some research, and had decided to go with a bundle from Rogers since we already had cell phone service with them. I arranged everything to be setup on the day before our move (Feb. 25th), and that’s where our tale of epic fail begins.
I won’t bore you with the details, I’ll just bore you with the summary instead: between Rogers and Bell, it took them from Feb. 25th until Mar. 20th to get all our various services running, with internet being the last one to come up on the 20th. The details are somewhat comical (if you don’t happen to be me) and I’m happy to share them over beer at some point.
Despite initiating the entire fail chain, Rogers actually salvaged a lot of good will at the end of the process by getting their act together, but I’m not very impressed with either company or their customer service to be honest. Thanks to my parents and in-laws for letting me work at their houses over the course of this fiasco, although I hope I don’t have to commute in order to telecommute again any time soon.
Gotta love a two-party system.
I feel (and have lived through an almost exact variation of) your pain, albeit in reverse. I was struggling to get Bell (aka Aliant in New Brunswick) ADSL running at their advertised speed after being told by a Rogers tech to “just call Bell” after he balked at doing an install when he saw the massive junction of cable running into my house and split over two satellite dishes. Fair enough, I figured it should be pretty good given the amount of fiber running through the province. That’s what I get for applying “moron logic” to residential DSL connectability.
Aliant provided really good phone support and their techs were knowledgeable and went the extra mile (literally, in my case, tracking down bridges in the lines) but in the end, weren’t able to get me a stable connection, even after replacing lines inside my house. Rogers came back and sent a technician who was able to make sense of the wiring morass and I now have a 10mbps/1mbps cable connection.
Those were some pretty gritty couple of weeks though.
Oh, you should crack that beer since we’re “sharing”…