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Review by XR999 See Profile

  • Location: Ottawa, ON, Canada
  • Cost: $59 per month
  • Install: about 2 days
Fast Hookup, Good Speed, Reliable
DNS Redirection, Low Bandwidth Caps, Throttling, Drone Customer Support/Service, Unable to Follow Own Procedures
If you've got no other choice it's fine but if you do go elsewhere
Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection Reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:

Final Update: Well this turned into a wall of text didn't it, anyway the disconnection has come and gone, surprisingly cleanly, no further calls from Rogers, no disconnection of my new TekSavvy Cable connection (although that's also in no small part thanks to the sign I posted saying I am a TPIA subscriber) and most importantly no overbilling or other Rogers BS. So final thoughts, if TekSavvy or another cable TPIA provider isn't available in your area yet and slow DSL (below 5Mbps) is your only other choice then consider using Rogers with the understanding you will be in for pain if you actually use your Internet and that Rogers is deceiving at the best of times.

Update June 26th, 2011: Well it's finally happened, I've cancelled Rogers with the disconnect date coming July 22nd and a pending switch to TekSavvy. I don't expect the transition to be smooth as I will be reusing the modem I purchased for Rogers but I'm prepared for the downtime. Final thoughts so far, the cancellation went alright, the rep asked if she lowered the price, would I stay which I replied with, so you'll lower the price but I still have to deal with the 80GB cap, throttling and DNS redirection, thanks but no thanks. Just a question now how many times will Rogers attempt to "save" me as a customer over the next few weeks.

Update: March 22nd, 2011: Service has had a few blips in speed more recently, I've had one or two nights where I was lucky to be getting 10mbps (the speed I pay for) with 4-5mbps being about the worst I ever saw. The biggest issue is the cap though, 80GB a month with UA is really starting to become an issue and with TekSavvy Cable being delayed how many times in Ottawa, who knows when I will get to switch.

Update: January 7th, 2011: Service is still reliable and with speedboost is as fast as ever but Rogers has taken to calling me again. Took 7 tries before I finally got someone to actually answer the phone instead of disconnect and I shut her up real quick when I started talking about TekSavvy and pulled out the line, TekSavvy has call centers in Canada with people who's first language is English. Basically after that it was get me off the phone as quick as possible although I made sure I said please don't call me again and I think they will listen after that.

The only saving grace Rogers has ever had with me is reliable service and that will change soon as TekSavvy Cable should deploy this month in Ottawa and as soon as it's available, I'm calling to switch. Rogers has never respected my wishes as to telemarketing, has drone support and quite frankly isn't deserving of what I pay them every month.

Update: November 11, 2010 Service has smoothed out now with no outages or problems with websites recently and as Rogers is now testing out speed boost in most if not all areas my initial download speed can now reach over 20mbps instead of the 10mbps I pay for. That all aside the amount I service I get for what I pay Rogers is still too low and with the announcement over at the TekSavvy side of the forums here at DSLReports that cable Internet should be available in Ottawa by the end of November, I won't be a Rogers customer for that much longer.

Update: September 17th, 2010 Well now Rogers has issues with one particular website, I simply can not log-in and the website is working fine and if I run through a proxy, I can log-in so needless to say I am annoyed. But the main reason for the sudden update was a small victory, I had received a call to give Rogers some more info on my website issue and when I was finished I asked to be put through to retentions, well after 50 minutes on the phone (between retentions and tech support) I was able to get my usage cap upped to 80GB a month with a $10 discount for 3 months and NO contract. My hope is after 3 months TekSavvy Cable will be ready but if not I will call in to see about extending that deal.

Update: September 15th, 2010: Still getting random disconnects every once in awhile, regardless of whatever I do on my end, even switching DNS servers doesn't resolve it and I know calling Rogers is pointless, no rep on their end will do anything to solve the problem. The day I can get TekSavvy Cable here is the day Rogers is saying goodbye to me, I can't take the caps, problems and price anymore.

Update: August 30th, 2010: Connection is constantly delivering advertised speeds although I been receiving disconnects/page errors more often although I think this is down to some issues with the DNS servers (I just haven't bothered to switch to the Google servers yet). My 60GB cap though is a real grinding point as I find now it's very hard to stay within that limit. I've also talked to Rogers at least 3 times and at no point have they offered anything worthwhile to keep me from switching. At best they offer a 20-30% discount on the condition of me staying for a year which I refuse to do when 3web and TekSavvy are cheaper options with far better features and no contracts.

Update: July 21st, 2010: My connection has slightly improved lately with speedtests showing I'm getting slightly above 10MBPS and lately my upload speeds have been more consistent as well. I'm also going to be with Rogers for at least a few months longer now as TekSavvy Cable isn't apparently deploying to Ottawa until August and from the early adopter stories, I think I'll wait for a bit after that for them to get the kinks worked out but my bad points still remain valid to this day and Rogers is probably never going to fix them. The only other thing that has improved is my phone has finally gone silent in terms of Rogers but that's only thanks to my efforts, not there's.

Update: June 18th, 2010: I'm now at the point with Rogers where I'm checking the forums here at least once a day to see if there's any news on the timeline for TekSavvy Cable Internet in Ottawa as Rogers is absolutely incapable of following their own procedures. I opted out of the use of my phone number to third parties yet I'm still getting called even after the grace period of 5 days which is unacceptable. Speed is still consistent though and I've had no connection issues so the reliability rating has gone up but other than that I can't give Rogers a better mark than 1 in any other part of the review system.

Update: June 8th, 2010: Got a call from Rogers by coincidence, anyway after being hung up on during a transfer I called in myself and talked to two representatives and apparently the best they could do still costs more than TekSavvy Cable will cost me and it still has lower limits, DNS redirection and throttling. In other words once my 3 months free are up and TekSavvy is up and running in Ottawa, goodbye Rogers.

Update: June 3rd, 2010: Received my first bill and seems alright (I'm quite surprised) although their usage metering system I think is quite generous to Rogers as they claim out of 60GB a month I've already used over 19GB and I'm not even 2 weeks into the month and I don't download over BitTorrent or P2P. Now to this point DNS redirection has annoyed me but I could live with it but now I found out today my cell phone which I used to sign up for Rogers service as I don't pay for a land line has been given out to tele-marketers by Rogers themselves. If you don't want this to happen you have to opt-out of the sharing of such information (which takes 5 days to process). To say the least after finding out about this, I was not happy whatsoever.

At this point Rogers is going to have to be coming up with something pretty darn amazing in terms of a deal to keep me as a customer because with TekSavvy Cable Internet on the way to Ottawa soon, once it's stable I believe I will be becoming a customer of theirs (I know it's technically still Rogers but TekSavvy provides most of the equipment and they definitely aren't this shady in terms of business practices). The only saving grace for Rogers is I've got 2 months of free Internet as part of buying my modem but due to the low bandwidth limits even this probably won't be completely free. Even though I've said it in my bottom line I'll repeat it again, if you've got any other choice than Rogers, take it, this has to be the low of ISP's in Canada (short of not being able to actually give you service).

Update: May 28th, 2010:

Reliability has evened out now, Internet stays consistently on and surprisingly unlike my previous Bell DSL connection, my Rogers connection has very stable speed, around 9.1MBPS in speedtests regardless of the time of day and considering I'm paying for 10, such speed is very good.

I've also got past DNS redirection by switching to the open Google DNS servers although I do plan to continue to complain to Rogers about that as I shouldn't have to use third party servers to avoid redirection.

Update: May 25th, 2010:

Well just one day after having it installed I've already experienced a few hang-ups where for a few seconds to minutes my Internet just stops and then comes back, not impressed at all, even Bell when I had them was more reliable than that.

Original Review

Well I finally took the leap after moving into an apartment complex that required Rogers to get any decent speed and now after testing it out I'll outline a few things.

Purchasing was straightforward, I entered a Rogers Plus Store, said I wanted Internet service, and a sales associate began the procedure. I purchased a modem kit after being made aware that I would receive 3 free months of Internet which would off-set the modem costs plus I wouldn't be paying the modem rental fee every month (I've yet to see if Rogers won't screw that up). Besides signing the receipt for the purchase of the modem I never signed anything else which did surprise me and due to my previous knowledge pre-sales information was little, hence my low rating.

Now the speed, I'm paying for 10 MBPS download and Rogers has mostly delivered on that with 8-9 MBPS in my testing results and in my unscientific time browsing the Internet it is noticeably faster vs. my previous Bell Internet connection. Also tested out a Ubuntu ISO download straight from the Ubuntu website and was pulling a solid 1.2MB download speed from a Canadian server. Connection reliability has also been good so far and the speed pretty much constant so I give high marks there.

The tech was also good, installed my Internet on a holiday Monday and didn't leave despite the fact I had forgot to make arrangements to have the tech granted access to the room necessary to activate my Internet line. Regardless after that was taken care of, the tech took care of the work order, removed a splitter left on the cable line from the previous tenant to give me a dedicated line (I won't be subscribing to cable TV) and attached loose cable to the wall to neaten things up (most of the install work had already been done previously).

Activation was almost instant as well so in terms of speed I'm satisfied although the cap is pathetic at just 60GB. TekSavvy, my preferred choice if I had the option offers a much higher cap for less than my current package at $46.99 plus taxes (I haven't been through a billing cycle yet, will update after I receive my first bill).

In terms of customer service I did receive a call less than a hour after the tech left and my Internet became active from an automated system for feedback on the install, I was honest and when prompted to leave any comments. I did leave feedback indicating my displeasure with Rogers policy on DNS redirection and opt-out procedure for DNS redirection (even Bell cleaned up their act and has started offering a permanent DNS redirection opt-out procedure that simply requires your DSL username and password and a modem reboot). To my surprise about half an hour later I received another call from a live person who wanted to follow up on that. Unsurprisingly though it must be policy to review a call or policy to review calls after leaving a rather long comment and the person who contacted me was certainly not knowledgeable at all, I, the customer, was explaining Rogers policy to him to describe my displeasure, not impressed. After getting the standard we will forward your comments/concerns to management, that was the end of that call.

Also of course the standard BitTorrent/file sharing policy is also a nuisance and more than unacceptable (BitTorrent does have legal uses and it's unacceptable of Rogers punish legitimate usage of services and goes against the principles of Net Neutrality)

To sum it up, I'll update as I have further experience with Rogers but I must repeat my bottom line, if you have something else available, even Bell, take it. Despite the speed and fast install I still regard Rogers as a last resort and believe me, if Teksavvy Cable or DSL or even Bell was available, I would be using something else.

member for 13.8 years, 303 visits, last login: 272 days ago
updated 12.6 years ago


blup9720
@74.198.8.x

blup9720

Anon

Negotiation?

Don't count on it too much. When I called Rogers to cancel my Internet services I didn't even have to negotiate. The rep offered me their $60 service for $43 or $45 (can't remember which) and said that's the best she could do, but couldn't do anything about the bandwidth caps and even then, I had to make a 12 month commitment to get that offer. The irony is that I wasn't so much quitting for the price, but for the bandwidth caps. Go figure.

Teksavvy is rolling out cable in many areas over the next few months and improving their DSL (and even mention fibre), so patience. There is a mention of Ottawa getting it sometime before the end of August in a service email sent out recently.

Good luck.

XR999
See ya Rogers.
join:2010-05-24
Ottawa, ON

XR999

Member

Re: Negotiation?

I know the window for the Ottawa area is June-August according to TekSavvy for cable and since my 3 months of free Rogers Internet run out in August (came free with the modem purchase and no contract was required (and now I have a modem for TekSavvy cable)) hopefully they are up and running by then (I really don't want to have to pay Rogers anymore than I already will).

Decent DSL is not possible where I live though (older apartment complex) and I didn't expect much in negotiation with Rogers (but might as well try, maybe I'll get some super rep or something, plus no matter what I'll be giving them a nice long-winded speech about my problems with the service, all the while wasting their time and money).