Uh-Oh! Canada

Rogers@Home and Excite@Home pass on a legacy of substandard customer service to Shaw@Home — Users wonder if anybody's Home?

by Patricia Fusco
Associate Editor, ISP-Planet
[October 31, 2000]

Typically I do not revisit an issue two consecutive articles in a row, but this week's cable developments in Canada is the exception to the norm

Last week, in an article concerning Rogers Communications cable service woes I explored Rogers@Home user problems and Excite@Home's fixes.

Service error du jour
After speaking with representatives of both @Home divisions, it appeared that appropriate action was taken to resolve intermittent e-mail problems and spotty service outages occurring throughout Rogers@Home service area.

In addition to frantically laying patches that offloaded Rogers@Home e-mail and stabilized its network, the Canadian cable company implemented a poorly crafted customer credit program and Rogers@Home Vice President Alek Krstajic released a service update on Oct. 26th.

Of course, the users that needed access to the information the most probably did not see the e-mail until a day later at best, because that's how Rogers' network continued to operate in British Columbia and Ontario, according to Chris Weisdorf, Rogers@Home User's Association president and technical director.

Service au contraire
Weisdorf has been closely monitoring e-mail issues for Rogers@Home users since both Rogers and Excite@Home said "all was well in Canada."

• [Oct. 27 - 1:30 AM EST from a senior member in BC]
  Accessing the POP3 server has been absolutely pathetic. I'm on a couple of relatively high-volume mailing lists, so I really notice when it takes thirty seconds to login to the server, and five or ten seconds to download each message.
• [Oct. 27 - 1:36 AM EST from another senior member in BC]
  Well, yours is the only mail I've received since 8 p.m. yesterday — highly unusual. I have had many messages show up anywhere from a few hours to days later. I have frequent problems connecting to the server or problems with the server rejecting my password. I've not had any dupes, or lost mail, but the mail has not been great.
• [Oct. 27 - 8:14 AM EST from a senior member in London, ON]
  Some e-mails to me have been delayed a day, I saw them on my forwarding service like Oct. 25 but not on the @Home service till Oct. 26, though headers showed they were supposed to have arrived on time. Some duplicates, including your own inquiry of Oct. 27
• [Oct. 27 - 1:40 PM EST from a senior member in Waterloo, ON]
  Hmmm, your message just duped on me. Duplications have been minor in nature (no more 900+ e-mails to delete) but they've not been eradicated either.
• [Oct. 27 - 10:19 AM EST from the same member Waterloo, ON]
  DNS at 24.2.9.40 and 24.2.9.41 were both DOA again this morning — getting that wonderful "storage services unavailable - wait a few minutes and try again" error... I guess it's time to move all my e-mail through another account - these @Home servers are just too unreliable to put any trust in.

Service disruption part deux
But these are just the reports about e-mail services from senior members of the RHUA. Rogers@Home also said that service disruptions would be resolved by adding of a new DHCP server to the network. According to Rogers, e-mail functionally was returned and connectivity would also be fully restored.

Weisdorf said that Rogers@Home service has improved in Ontario, but that things are still not repaired by any stretch of the imagination.

"If Excite@Home and Rogers@Home both 'emphatically stated that the e-mail problems have been repaired since Saturday' and were referring to service in both BC and Ontario by 'the e-mail problems,' then obviously that is a bold-faced lie," Weisdorf said.

For those that appreciate irony, Rogers@Home news servers failed while Weisdorf and I conversed. He said that it's just one more instance where Rogers@Home would apply a temporary Excite@Home-provided fix to repair the service temporarily, but never address a long-term repair.

"Our news servers, at least in Ontario, are failing again," Weisdorf said. "This hasn't been an issue for about a 2 or 3 months, but now it's back again. This is what I meant when I described @Home's temporary solutions to everything. No fix is ever permanent with these people."

Au revoir Rogers ... Bonjour Shaw
How could Rogers@Home provide such pitiful service and expect to keep customers from switching to different providers or canceling service altogether?

The answer is simple — Rogers never intended to keep British Columbia clients in its fold.

Monday Shaw Communications received regulatory approval to acquire all of Rogers Communications cable system clients in British Columbia.

The transaction, approved by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, makes Shaw the principal cable and communications provider in the province, serving more than 1 million or 90 percent of British Columbia's cable customers.

Shaw is exchanging 600,000 of its Eastern Canada customers for Rogers' 623,000 British Columbia users. Perhaps Shaw@Home may better serve BC users than Rogers@Home did, but what level of service @Home users in the Eastern provinces could expect remains to be seen.

Shaw à la délivrance
Perhaps this is the end of BC @Home users service woes. After all, just last week Shaw Communications said it would spend $132.5 million US to improve its Internet network across Canada.

Peter Bissonnette, Shaw Cablesystems president said the upgrade would expand its cable modem network, as well as to deliver improved network performance for Shaw cable Internet access and its new digital cable TV services.

"Our commitment to our customers is that we will provide them with the fastest and most reliable high-speed Internet service in Canada,'' Bissonnette said. "This significant investment reflects our commitment to this objective."

But that's not all Shaw has planned for its cable modem users. Bissonnette said Shaw's strategy is designed to quickly upgrade the quality of service it provides cable modem users, including the neglected group of former Rogers@Home customers.

"In addition to building our own backbone, we're reducing the networks node size to 1,000 customers per node," Bissonnette said. "Right now node size varies from 5,000 to 6,000 homes per node."

Speed limit adieu
Bissonnette said that Shaw would further upgrade its high-speed service by replacing customers current hardware with a cable modem that doesn't governor users' throughput.

"We're replacing customers Lancity hardware with Terayon cable modems at no charge," Bissonnette said. "Terayon does not limit throughput and is a far more robust modem, it won't be a Devil to maintain."

Shaw estimates that the cable modem swap will take three to four months to complete.

Au revoir @Home
Bissonnette said Shaw's final step in its strategy to exit Excite@Home's network would come when it completes its data center.

"Our new building with our own data center and e-mail services will be ready on March 1 next year," Bissonnette said. "Then we will extricate ourselves from the current relationship with Excite@Home and work with them to build a content-only relationship."

Commitment to improving its cable infrastructure should serve Shaw well in the region. If Shaw less @Home delivers better cable services to British Columbia users that Rogers@Home apparently never intend to provide, then Shaw Cablesystems subscribers should really have something to get excite-d about.

— End

 

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	[Oct. 26, 2000]	Oh! Canada
	[Oct. 26, 2000]	Rogers@Home Service Notice