Things you should know about
Rogers @Home cable modem Internet Service Provider (ISP)
First written Feb.6/99 Please see new note part way
down about EXTREMELY POOR CUSTOMER SUPPORT.
If you wish to read the 2:10 minute CTV National News piece from
Goldhawk on the @Home services that aired across Canada April 22
at 11:25pm, go to http://www.goldhawk.com/consumer/19990422.shtml
UPDATE Feb. 1/2002: In the late summer early fall
of 2001 the @Home network that subcontracts internet servers &
backbone connections, indicated they were having financial problems.
Many cable companies (including Shaw & Cogico) did the responsible
thing by immediately starting to make plans to get their client
base of cable modem users switched over to their own servers &
internet backbone connection, however Rogers did nothing at first.
Later in the fall when the @Home network filed for bankruptcy protection,
Rogers had to push the panic button to try & get all 442,000
of it's cable modem users to switch over their email address &
web sites to the new Rogers servers by the end of November. Fortunately
the courts allowed @Home to stay in operation a little longer &
Rogers negotiated an addition 2 month coverage with @Home to help
easy the transition period. Unfortunately far too many people found
Rogers inaccurate & incomplete instructions too difficult &
were not able to easily switch over, so many of them simply canceled
their Rogers account & went with Bell Sympatico's high speed
DSL or some other DSL internet provider. I never was successful
in switching the web sites over because Rogers new web server wasn't
even working at first & then when it was, it wasn't compatible
with my Cute FTP version 2.6 (1998) upload software. What really
astonishes me is that Rogers (& presumable many other cable
companies), never considered the fact that their subcontract relationship
with @Home might not last forever (duh) (what business relationship
does last very long these days?) and they did not negotiate ownership
rights to the parcel of domain names they were given so that they
would not have to switch everybody over to new email addresses.
Talk about a major blunder. Rogers had about 442,000 clients &
each of them had up to 7 email addresses. Can you imagine the headache
& cost to Rogers of having to convert up to 3 million email
addresses over? Since Rogers really shot themselves in the foot
this time, I'm not surprised that nearly everyone I knew that was
on Rogers cable modem, considered this the last straw & switched
to another ISP. I had been with Roger cable modem for 3.5 years
& consistently had problems a minimum of a couple times every
week during that 3.5 years. Meanwhile I would be getting emails
from Rogers apologizing for the bad service & indicating improvements
were in the works. I hope Rogers learns their lesson that incompetence,
bad service that insults clients, not planning ahead & broken
promises wear a little thin after awhile & hope for better service
does not spring forth externally, especially when there is viable
competition to switch to.
@HOME: @Home is an organization based near San
Francisco California. Many North American cable companies subcontract
with @Home for the email & web servers & internet connection
part of the service. Unfortunately these cable companies weren't
very wise because they never seriously considered what would happen
if they parted company with the @Home people. Indeed in the early
fall of 2001 Incite who owns @Home indicated they were having financial
troubles. Several cable companies immediately started to make plans,
but Rogers Cable did nothing until later in the fall when Incite
@Home actually filed for bankruptcy. Not only did this mean that
Rogers had to scramble to install their own servers, but it meant
that they had the monumental headache of switching 442,000 customers
over to new email addresses in a very short period of time &
each one of those customers could have up to 7 email addresses (potential
over 3 million email address changes). Now what really boggles my
mind is how all these cable companies could issue email addresses
for a domain name (@home.com) that they didn't even own or have
control over once the @Home company went bust. In my view that is
monumentally irresponsible to not take measures to ensure continuity
of a domain name. The switchover to new email addresses has caused
major headaches for these cable companies & they deserve what
they got. It's pretty clear that these cable companies didn't plan
ahead on behalf of their customers, so if their customers leave
& go elsewhere for their internet service, the cable companies
will have nobody else but themselves to blame, though I'm sure they'll
try to shift the blame.
THEORETICAL CONNECTION SPEEDS: The @Home network
offers it's services through local cable companies throughout North
America (currently 16 are signed up). It offers bi-directional internet
access via the same cable you get your television service from.
In most areas it is the only really fast inexpensive internet access
available since Bell seems to have had troubles rolling out their
ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line) internet service in most
areas. In our area @Home offers up to 3000 kilobits/second (375
kilobytes/second) for downloads & browsing (that's 53 times
faster than a 56.6 telephone modem in theory) & up to 400 kilobits/second
(50 kilobytes/second) for uploads (that's 7 times faster than a
56.6 telephone modem in theory). It seldom comes anywhere close
to those speeds for download but I have achieved up to 98% of those
speeds when doing direct transfers in an upload mode. The service
is currently aimed at home consumers who want really fast internet
surfing so @Home has purposely throttled back on the upload speeds
because they don't want users & businesses using the service
as a substitute for an expensive T1 connection (which would bottleneck
the bandwidth of the system). I'm told that the actual cable modems
are capable of up to around 10,000 kilobits/second (1250 kilobytes/second)
in both directions but their servers aren't yet able to handle that
(the servers can't even handle the current bandwidth properly).
ROGERS CABLE MODEM IS A CONSUMER SERVICE: Initially
the @Home service seems like a dream come true especially for a
small business like mine that operates out of a home & needs
fast internet speeds, but there are some serious issues to be concerned
about. The cable companies are wisely pointing out that the @Home
service is aimed at consumers & that they eventually plan to
offer an enhanced version for businesses called @Work (now available),
once they get the bugs & kinks worked out of the @Home service.
I've been using the @Home service since Sept 17/98 & it's quite
clear by the extremely poor service much of the last few months
that the cable companies have not got the bugs worked out yet. Even
throughout 2000 & 2001 there have been frequent email server
problems. It's been my experience that many home consumers of internet
services aren't very aware of when their internet service provider
is giving them problems, but businesses sure know it when the system
is down or very slow for several hours or days at a time & they
hear reports of incoming email bouncing.
COSTS & COMPETITION: My local cable company
is called Rogers & they charge $44.95 Canadian (about $28 American)
per month plus taxes for the @Home connection (add $10. to that
cost if you don't also subscribe to their cable TV service). There
is a $150 Canadian (about $97.50 American) charge for installation
which includes a PCI or ISA Ethernet card in your computer, a 2
way passive cable splitter, a new run of cable to your computer
& software. Sometimes the cable companies offer special installation
discounts at certain times (like $100. off or free during certain
dates), or you can save a little money by doing the installation
yourself (but you better really know lots about networking). As
an inducement to sign up, Rogers currently waives the cable modem
rental charge of $15.05 Canadian (about $9.78 American) for the
first six months. After that period, assuming there are cable modems
available on the market to purchase, they say they will start charging
rental or you can buy your own. There is some doubt whether Rogers
will actually start charging for the cable modem rental as Shaw
Cable & perhaps some other @Home cable companies in the USA
are already including the cable modem in the $44.95 monthly connection
fee. To date (Dec 2001) Rogers has not charged the cable modem rental
fee. Cable companies have a monopoly in their designated areas so
there is no guarantee that one cable company will follow the market
practices of the others. If Bell ever does get their ADSL high speed
internet access up & rolling in most areas, then the cable companies
will have some stiff competition especially when they subcontract
the DSL connection through your existing telephone dial up internet
service provider (no need to change your email address).
INSTANTLY & PERMANENTLY CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET (YA
RIGHT): Cable companies are advertising that unlike a telephone
modem internet service provider which requires a dial up connection
& ties up your phone line, a cable modem is constantly connected
to the internet (as long as your computer is turned on). While that
may be true, the bottleneck seems to be the @Home mail & browsing
servers (especially the mail server). Many times I've had to wait
for a server connection longer than it would have taken me to logon
via a telephone connection. I thought I was going to be able to
dump my telephone modem ISP & the extra telephone line I was
paying for once I got onto this new cable modem service, but the
service has been so unreliable that I am currently forced to maintain
my old & my new ISP's just to be able to stay connected for
my business. I've had more reports of clients email to me bouncing
in the last few months than I did in the last few years with Execulink.
Bounced email because of a downed server is bad enough, but trashed
email is completely inexcusable in my opinion. If an incoming mail
server is down for whatever reason, the email should be diverted
to another holding server pending the return to service of the main
server, rather than bounce email back to the sender as undeliverable
or just trashing it (throwing it away or deleting it). How would
you feel about the post office if they returned all your snail mail
to the sender & marked it as undeliverable on days when your
local mailman was sick, or the substitute mailman just threw the
mail in the garbage because he couldn't get it done on his shift?
Think about it, because that's exactly what the Rogers @Home email
server does with your email on occasion when their email server
is down. I've already lost some business because someone sent me
an email but it didn't get through.
EMAIL ATTACHMENT SIZE: My old telephone modem
ISP (Execulink), as bad & as slow as they are, has no size limitation
on file attachments to email (recently they implemented a 20 MB
per email limitation). @Home says they have a 5 megabyte attachment
limitation & they claim that email was never designed for large
attachments (funny that other much slower ISPs can handle large
attachments). The real kicker is that the @Home servers inaccurately
measure file sizes 34 - 37% larger than they really are. That means
that you can really only send or receive an email of around 3.65
- 3.73 megabytes before it will bounce back to the sender. I have
gotten Rogers @Home technical support to verify that they are seeing
the same exaggerated file sizes, but they won't pass that information
along to the people who could correct this (apparently it's not
there job). I think it's pretty sad when an ISP that has as fast
a connection to the internet as this one does, limits attachments
to a meager 5 megabytes & then misjudges the size so you can
really only send or receive attachment up to about 3.65 megabytes.
@Home also will only hold up to 10 megabytes of incoming email (&
attachments) in each mailbox before they start bouncing the email,
so if you get a lot of email or large attachments, you better be
prepared to have someone come in & download your email while
you're on vacation or download it from another ISP using the NetMail
feature. Incidentally, the Bell Sympatico high speed DSL internet
package also has a size limitation on outgoing email, but it's 104
megabytes (28 times larger than @home's size limitation).
WEB SITE SIZE & SPEED: Rogers includes 7 emails
accounts, each with a 10 megabyte web site. So I hoped this meant
that maybe I could combine my seven 10 meg sites into one big site
of 70 megabytes which would either allow me to put large downloadable
files there or create an FTP site where I could temporarily place
a large 15 megabyte AVI file & such for my clients to download.
No such luck, they won't let you combine your sites. What's more,
lately I sometimes haven't been able to even upload to my own site
because the @Home servers weren't working right. I would get a message
that says “Can't close data transfer gracefully”. Furthermore,
the download speeds for a 4.7 megabyte file on an @Home server have
been at certain times unbearably slow (often 12 KB/sec or slower
plus stalls) & often the download terminates before it's finished
downloading. The web speeds certainly aren't what I would expect
from a high speed internet service provider & often are not
fast enough to play a quality movie off an @Home server. I've
found that other ISP's sites for file downloads are usually far
faster than Rogers own @Home web server site. So much for blazingly
fast internet access. If you want to trace each server & their
time delay in the chain between you & a web site to find out
where the problem is, open up a dos prompt (command prompt in Windows
NT) & type tracert www.siteyouwant.com then hit enter (there
is a space after tracert & you should type in the site you are
tracing to).
EMAIL SERVERS UPDATED ON A WEEKDAY: Rogers @Home
will intentionally take their email server down in the middle of
a busy weekday day for routine upgrades & they don't tell you
ahead of time when the server will be down. When I complained &
asked why they didn't do routine upgrades in the wee hours of the
morning or on weekends, customer support stated that this isn't
a business service (implying that consumers don't care or it doesn't
matter to them). As far as I'm concerned, they're charging enough
for this service that it is reasonable to assume that a lot of small
businesses will be using it for business email on weekdays. Besides,
even home consumers deserve better than to have the email server
taken down for a few hours in the middle of a business day. It's
bad enough when the mail server goes down in the middle of a weekday
because of unexpected technical problems, but to purposely take
it off line for routine upgrades in the middle of a weekday is unacceptable.
Clearly Rogers & @Home aren't the least bit interested in trying
to minimize the problems & downtime for their customers.
CACHING & WEAK LINKS IN YOUR BROWSING SPEED:
Your internet browsing is only as fast as the slowest link. If the
server on the other end or the relay hop servers in between are
slow, it doesn't matter how fast your connection is, you'll only
be downloading at a fraction of the speed. Rogers says they try
to bypass some of this by caching some of the most
common internet sites on their local servers to speed things up.
I've been to a lot of popular sites that receive tens of thousands
of visitors per day & seldom do they seem any faster, so this
local caching idea doesn't seem to be working as planned. In fact,
I just discovered that when I update my Execulink web site (not
an @Home site), I don't notice the updates right away when browsing
with my cable modem internet connection because the @Home server
is caching my Execulink site & it shows yesterdays
web sight and not the new information I just updated. So this caching
concept certainly isn't working as planned & is actually creating
new problems because it doesn't update right away.
NO DOMAIN NAMES: Nearly all telephone modem ISPs
offer the option of purchasing a Domain Name (i.e. www.YourCompany.com)
even for consumers, though mostly it is businesses who would want
a domain name. The @Home service does not offer domain names even
though it would be very easy for them to do so because each account
usually keeps the same static IP address (recently switch to dynamic
IP addresses). Presumably when they finally get their @Work service
up & running they will offer domain names, but at a huge increase
in price. Bell Sympatico's high speed consumer DSL connection also
doesn't offer domain names but their business DSL connection (at
$79.) does. Some local Internet Service Providers now offer DSL
connections & domain names.
WEB SITE NAMES TOO COMPLEX: Web site names are
unnecessarily complex. For example my old company site (no longer
valid) is http://members.home.net/impacttelevideo when
it could have been simplified to http://home.com/impacttelevideo
CHOOSE YOUR MAIN EMAIL NAME CAREFULLY: Rogers
& presumably the other @Home cable companies have a third party
company do all the telephone sign ups. Apparently this other company
uses different computer software which forces you to chose your
Primary user email name with up to around 6 or 8 characters maximum
(quite limiting). Afterwards once your cable modem service is up
& running, you can go on line & choose the other 6 email
names, but now they can be 3 - 32 characters. Rogers doesn't tell
you how difficult it can be to change your Primary account name
later on. They originally told me I might have to do without my
cable modem service for several days while they got around to changing
my Primary user name. If you sign up, choose your Primary user name
carefully because it's not as easy to change it afterwards as it
is to change the other account names. Insist that they allow you
to use as many characters as you do for the other accounts. By the
way, although @Home services tells you that your email address must
be lower case (i.e. doug.hembruff@home.com) the server is really
not case sensitive for incoming email, so people can email you using
a combination of upper & lower cases (i.e. Doug.Hembruff@home.com)
NO DIAL UP CONNECTION WHEN TRAVELING: If you're
traveling, you cannot access your @Home email from your laptop with
a dial up telephone connection to the @Home network. You can only
remotely access your email if you also have paid for a standard
telephone modem ISP using a feature called NetMail. I would have
thought that the @Home people would have at least provided for a
dialup connection (even if it was a long distance call) to retrieve
your email when traveling, rather than having to maintain another
ISP. They do now have a Remote Access box they'll sell you for $14.95,
but every time you use it to retrieve email or browse, you pay $0.25
per minute of connection time. In contrast, Bell Sympatico's new
(A)DSL internet service does include up to 10 hours a month of dialup
connection when you are away from home with your laptop & they
have local toll-free numbers for every major city in Canada.
ASK FOR A CREDIT OR REFUND: In order to encourage
Rogers @Home to get their act together, whenever there is a serious
service disruption or slowdown, I try to phone their customer support
line, find out what the problem is & if appropriate I demand
a credit on my bill. If we all did that, Rogers & the @Home
people would soon get their act together or suffer serious loss
of revenue. Lately however Rogers has been unwilling to give a credit
saying that I didn't phone in each & every time their was a
disruption or slowdown (they are usually willing to acknowledge
that there was a problem though). When I try to phone in during
serious problem times I get a message that says the wait to speak
to a service person is currently up to 45 minutes (now that's service
for you). If you decide to sign up for the @home service, you'll
have to keep after them on a regular basis, or just put up with
intermittent service. By the way, on more than one occasion now
Rogers has promised me credits that they didn't deliver on until
I followed up to remind them what they promised. I get the feeling
that they tell you what you want to hear and then leave it up to
you to catch them. Throughout 2000 there have been numerous service
interruptions that I have emailed them about & asked for a refund.
Most of those messages go completely unanswered.
A cable modem account can be wonderful & very fast when it's
working properly, but very frustrating when it isn't working right.
Perhaps in time, many of the current startup problems & rapid
expansion problems of the @Home cable modem system will be ironed
out. Expansion has been so rapid that Rogers claims to already have
50,000 users signed up as of Jan. 99 (Broadcaster magazine in Dec
99 claims 386,000 Rogers @Home users). News papers in the fall of
2001 claim 442,000 customers. By contrast, Broadcaster magazine
claims that Bell has only signed up about 30,000 ADSL users. In
the mean time, shop wisely & let your cable company know what
you expect in an Internet Service Provider. If they have a money
back guarantee time period (say 2 months or so) where you can get
a full refund if you're not happy with the service & wish to
drop it, don't be afraid to take advantage of it (you'll be sending
a clear message to them). So far they just don't seem to get it
& I've lost count of the numerous times the email servers have
been down or extremely slow. You can read up on Rogers @Home service
at http://www.shoprogers.com/
ALTERNATIVES TO CABLE MODEM: If you need a faster
internet connection than a telephone modem can give you, you should
check the Canadian RESIDENTIAL Bell web site at www.bell.sympatico.ca/speedup
or BUSINESS at http://www.bell.ca/adsl
or at http://www.bell.ca/adsl/frameset4.asp
(A)DSL is usually about 960 kilobits/second (or 120 kilobytes/second)
for downloads & browsing (which is 17 times
faster than a dial-up modem), (compared to cable modems 3000 kilobits
or 375 kilobytes/second)(about 53 times faster than a dial-up connection).
However (A)DSL's upload speed is usually only about
120 kilobits/second (or 15 kilobytes/second)(twice as fast a dial-up),
(compared to cable modems 400 kilobits/second or 50 kilobytes/second
for uploads)(7 times as fast as dial-up). The DSL upload speeds
are quite disappointing (120 kbps) being only slightly more than
twice that of a dial-up modem (56 kbps), but most people use downloading
& browsing much more & that is approximately 17 times faster
than a dial-up modem. Despite (A)DSL being approximately 1/3 the
speed of cable modem, in reality it might actually be faster than
cable modem much of the time because (A)DSL uses a dedicated line
(not shared bandwidth like cable modem), or so we are told in the
Sympatico advertising and (A)DSL uses a secure connection (though
nothing is secure without a good firewall) & because Bell's
DSL connection seems to go through less server hops than Rogers.
Even a good 56.6 telephone modem through a good ISP would sometimes
be better than Rogers @Home cable modem which doesn't work well
too much of the time & sometimes trashes your in/out email (though
you seldom know that it has been trashed). Bell Sympatico's high
speed DSL internet plan is about the same price as cable modem,
but it comes with 6 email address (not 7) & it only comes with
1 web site of 5 MB (upgradeable to 12 MB at no additional charge)
(whereas cable is 7 web sites of 10MB each).
FALSE & MISLEADING ADVERTISING: I have felt
for a long time that some of Roger's advertisements smacked of false
or misleading advertising, but recently (Nov. 99) I've notice a
Rogers television ad that had outright lies in it. The same ad appeared
in a 3/4 page spread in our local newspaper on Dec. 4/99. The ad
reads "So what's the deal with these phone guys? Now
they're tellin' us phone lines are a fast way to download stuff
from the Net? Are they trying to bamboozle us? The Internet on Cable
is way faster than even the fastest, most expensive telephone access.
And cable is still up to a hundred times faster than a regular phone
line. And that's the straight goods, isn't it guys? See these eyes?
You can't pull the wool over them." Apparently
Rogers doesn't want to acknowledge to the public that the telephone
company has been rolling out their (A)DSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber
Line) internet service using "a regular phone line", which
in theory is almost as fast as the @Home cable modem access &
in real world usage is often faster because (A)DSL doesn't have
to share the bandwidth with your neighbor during busy times of the
day. When Rogers claims that "And cable is still up to a hundred
times faster than a regular phone line" they are comparing
against the old obsolete analogue 28.8 modems sold several years
ago, not the newer 56.6 modems that have become the only speed dial-up
modem you can purchase in the last few years, and they certainly
aren't comparing against the newest (A)DSL digital modems that use
regular phone lines. So folks, it's Rogers who is trying to "Bamboozle"
you, not the phone company. I abhor such intentional misinformation.
To be fair, Bell Sympatico isn't much more honest in their advertising
(i.e. "I bought the neighborhood so I didn't have to share
the cable modem connection" advertising campaign). Too bad
these two companies don't concentrate on advertising their real
strengths rather than lies & perceptions.
ANYONE CAN CANCEL YOUR ACCOUNT: Rogers does not
have a proof of identity policy, so anyone who knows your name,
home phone number & street address can call Rogers, pretend
they are you & cancel your service. It happened to me. Rogers
puts the onus on you to provide them with a password or other proof
of identity information so an imposter can't mess with your account.
ACCESS USING MORE THAN ONE COMPUTER: Rogers now
offers an additional IP address for $9.95 per month per extra computer
(maximum 2 additional computers), for those computers in your home
that are already networked together. Alternatively, you could avoid
paying Rogers an additional amount for each computer by purchasing
internet sharing software such as WinProxy (about $79.99 Canadian
for 3 networked computers) by Ositis http://www.ositis.com
Not only will this save you money in the long run, but it provides
you with the additional benefit of a secure firewall. Alternatively
you could use a router/switcher port (hub) combination such as http://www.linksys.com
for about $130. CDN which acts as a hardware firewall & lets
you share files between your home computers. Most cable modem users
aren't aware that if you have file sharing turned on for networking
between your computers, without a firewall or password, other cable
modem users in your neighborhood may be able to look in on your
computer files. If you want a firewall only (without internet sharing
software) you can get ZoneAlarm 2.1 at http://www.zonelabs.com/
which is free for personal and non-commercial use & $20.
U.S. for businesses.
By Doug Hembruff.
Some parts last updated Feb. 2 2002
NOTE ON EXTREMELY POOR CUSTOMER SUPPORT:
I'm writing this update paragraph on March 28/99. My Rogers @Home
cable modem has been completely out of service for exactly ONE
WHOLE WEEK as of today & Rogers has done little to
even attempt to get it working right. Every day now for a week I've
email them at least 3 times a day at support@rogers.home.net
using my other ISP, but all I get back are automated replies saying
they've received my message. Rogers phone support line at 1 888
288-4663 has been busy for much of the week & when I was able
to get the recording it always said the average wait time would
be very long (up to 100 minutes on hold). Three times I waited &
it took 32 minutes on hold the first time, 72 minutes the second
time & 46 minutes to get through to a person the third time.
The tech support person the first time seemed completely incompetent
at being able to help. The second time I talked to Collin (employee
6813) who seemed more competent, but still wasn't able to help.
I tried the things he suggested but we could find no problem with
my system. He phoned back once as promised, but didn't phone again
as promised & just left me hanging without an answer. At the
beginning of the fourth day of no service, about all the comfort
he could offer was that my name was in the Queue for someone to
look after me, but that Rogers was having such severe problems all
over the province that they were taking much longer than normal
to get around to people. It's now 7 days without service & nobody
has phoned & nobody has come out to see if they can fix the
problem (I'm just left hanging). Today I talked to Tony (employee
8532) who apparently has his job performance graded by how long
he takes to solve a problem & after 1:25 hours, he wouldn't
talk to me any more because he had spent too much time on the phone
with me. We still had a driver to install but he passed me off to
Adam (employee 8537) who tried to help but couldn't (& I had
to explain everything all over again for the forth time). All service
technicians have refused to provide me with an email where I could
follow up with them without going through the convoluted process
of waiting on hold for a hour. Few have phone me back like they
promised & all were too willing to point the finger at the Ethernet
card as the problem but weren't willing to support it even though
they sold it to me. Apparently Roger absolves themselves of support
after one week, for the Ethernet card they sell you in the installation
kit. They don't even keep any spare Ethernet cards in stock so I
could drive to the local Rogers outlet & swap cards. Every diagnostic
we did indicated that the Ethernet card was working properly, but
it was convenient to blame the problem on that. They said I must
contact the manufacture of the Ethernet card (SMC) who could help
me diagnose it & would ship me a new one in several days if
it was defective. I've spent 16 years as a technician & I can
spot when people are poor diagnosticians & when they're passing
the buck. Rogers customer support absolutely refused to send a service
technician out to determine if the problem was their cable modem
or the Ethernet card they sold me. They basically dumped the problem
back in my lap (several times). So much for customer support &
the problem is still not solved. Virtually everyone I know in town
who has had a Rogers @Home cable modem account for awhile is having
major problems & REALLY dissatisfied with the service. I
SIMPLY CANNOT RECOMMEND ANYONE SUBSCRIBING TO THE ROGERS @Home CABLE
MODEM SERVICE AT THIS TIME. IT GETS A DISTINCT TWO THUMBS DOWN FROM
ME. If anyone knows of a way to stop Rogers from
advertising what they can't deliver, or knows of a class action
law suite against Rogers, or knows of a government agency that can
stop these people, please let me know as I am determined to let
Rogers know in no uncertain terms that their behavior & false
advertising is unacceptable.
April 9 follow up, finally after 11 days of being without my cable
modem, I got it working (no thanks to Rogers or the @Home people).
April 28 follow up. Last week on Thursday April
22 at 11:25pm the CTV National News aired a 2:10 minute piece right
across Canada on the problems that customers of Rogers & @Home
are facing. I was the person who alerted them to this problem. If
you missed it, you can read the text at http://www.goldhawk.com/consumer/19990422.shtml
A friend of mine forwarded the following compilation of information
he received about the poor performance that @Home cable modem customers
have been receiving across North America. You might find this very
interesting reading & it might change your mind about getting
a cable modem at this point in time.
TRYING TO CALL, BUT NO ONE'S ATHOME
Nothing about the Internet is generating more interest these days—or
attracting more new capital—than the red hot business of distributing
interactive programming and Web content over coaxial and fiber optic
cable. Vastly more data can be moved in this way than over conventional
telephone lines. Yet anyone who thinks that the marketing of Internet
services via cable systems is a cake-walk had better take a look
at the ongoing experience of AtHome Corp., the leader in the field.
Corporate giants like Microsoft Corp.—which is a partner
in the joint venture that operates MSNBC—and AT&T have
been paying multibillion-dollar sums to get into the “hgh
banidwidth” business. The preferred route: Acquire a cable
operator that already has a large installed customer base, then
use that cable network to market Internet connections to what amounts
to a captive audience.
AtHome is the company that actually puts cable companies into the
Net access business. In the last year, AtHome‘s stock has
been a Wall Street darling, soaring by more than 350 percent on
investor hopes for a big future payoff on an investment that already
tops $780 million.
But AtHome’s surging stock price has been spurred by an ultra-fast-growth
business plan that depends on adding new subscribers to the company’s
so-called “cable modem” Internet service at an annualized
200 percent-plus growth rate, quarter after quarter. Company officials
say that, at latest count, the AtHome service has roughly 310,000
subscribers, and that they expect the growth trend to continue.
Yet this very growth rate is now creating increasingly troublesome
technical and customer service issues for the four-year-old company.
And though the company says it is working hard to address them,
there is emerging evidence—albeit anecdotal in nature—that
the problems are not going away.
In Fremont, Calif., last week, angry members of the city council
ordered the local cable operator, Tele-Communications Inc., and
AtHome to sit down with city officials and agree to a written set
of minimally acceptable customer service standards for Fremont residents
who call up complaining of poor and unreliable service. The problems
arose after AtHome’s network crashed before Christmas and
wasn’t brought back online in Fremont for weeks—during
which time the cable company left subscribers in the dark as to
what was wrong or when it would be fixed. “You folks just
need to answer your telephones,” scolded one city council
member as he lectured company officials on proper treatment of their
customers.
Meanwhile, a story in the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper pulled
together a growing chorus of service complaints from AtHome subscribers
not just in Fremont but in cities from Portland, Ore., to Nashville,
Tenn., Birmingham, Ala. and elsewhere. The common gripe: it is becoming
increasingly difficult to connect to the service, and once connected,
online page-loading and surfing often turns out to be slower than
what is possible via conventional Internet connection services.
Worst of all, cable operators and AtHome rarely provide helpful
support in fixing the problems, and will sometimes ignore complaints
outright.
A kind of Internet clearing house has even sprung up for complaints
at http://members.home.net/badservice/
The page carries a long and daily-lengthening thread of kvetches
and complaints from disgruntled AtHome subscribers. ‘What
a joke. Nobody can solve my problem and I’ve been working
with them for 3 months. Service is erratic…My 33.6 modem was
faster and more reliable.’ from an ILLINOIS CUSTOMER. From
a Fort Worth, Texas, subscriber comes this: “My service has
been down twice since I subscribed 7 days ago. Once for just a few
hours, once for almost 48 hours. The tech I talked to said there
was no estimate on when it would be back up. He then connected me
with a customer service answering machine. I left a professional,
businesslike message. No return call. I sent an e-mail to AtHome
regarding my service problems so far. No answer.”
And this from an Ontario, Canada, subscriber: “Today I wake
up, I have to get my e-mail before I go to work, and of course the
mail server isn’t working. About 10 minutes later my connection
dies completely. I call tech support and am left on hold for 2 hours.
After explaining my problem they say well it should be fixed anywhere
from 2 to 24 hours from now.” And this from an Illinois customer:
“What a joke. Nobody can solve my problem and I’ve been
working with them for 3 months. My service is erratic. I see 100
percent packet loss about 30 percent of the time. My 33.6 modem
was faster and more reliable.” And finally, from Tennessee:
“AtHome is by far the worst organization I’ve ever dealt
with. My 2nd month with AtHome, cumulative downtime for that month
was 1.5 weeks. They offered no credit to my acct, so I asked and
got $3.24. Speed is variable to the point of insult.”
Do you have experience with AtHome or another high-speed Net provider?
Tell your tale on the Byron BBS http://bbs.msnbc.com/bbs/msnbc-byron/index.asp
These complaints all echo similar frustrations that I myself, as
an AtHome user, have experienced with the service since subscribing
to it through Cablevision of Connecticut in September of 1998: erratic
and unreliable connections, molasses-slow surfing speeds thereafter—and
a continuing inability of technicians or engineers, either at Cablevision
or AtHome, to diagnose and fix the problem.
AtHome officials say their own in-house customer surveys show a
high degree of satisfaction with the service, and that most of the
problems trace to temporary glitches that inevitably develop when
the company launches its service on a new cable system. The company
promised to provide a copy of its survey questionnaire for this
story, but at deadline had failed to supply it. The company’s
claims about the temporary nature of performance problems are simply
not supported by the public statements of customers. Many complaining
users say they’ve been experiencing poor performance for months
and that the company has been unable to remedy the problem.
’The system always slows down a lot in the evenings, ”
says Tracey Barrett of New Canaan, Conn., ’and many times
I haven’t been able to get logged on at all. But when they
send tech people to investigate, they always arrive during the day,
when everything is working normally, and they go away saying nothing’s
wrong.”
Many of AtHome’s difficulties may ultimately trace to the
sheer Space Program complexity of its cable modem network, which
depends on the smooth interaction of a vast system of cable company
nodes, head-ends, fiber and coaxial wires—all feeding into
and out of not just other networks but the entire Internet itself—a
setup that seems to baffle even many engineers and Internet professionals.
Thus, a Milwaukee, Wis.-based online stock quotes provider—Paragon
Software Inc.—says it has lately received more than 200 furious
complaints from customers, many who access the service via AtHome.
The gripes all concern slow data speeds for the receipt of the stock
price data. But, says Jennifer Bonano of Paragon, ’our engineers
traced the problem to a router being used by AtHome in the Chicago
area.” AtHome officials retort that the router in question
is in fact not used by AtHome at all, and that the problem must
thus lie elsewhere. Be that as it may, the data is simply not getting
through to Paragon Software customers trying to receive it via AtHome
cable modems and, once again, it would seem no one can say why.
Aaron Williams, a Fremont, Calif., software engineer who writes
code for so-called router-accelerators, says that AtHome simply
does not have adequate bandwidth to support the traffic it is bringing
on line. ’When I first became a subscriber two and one-half
years ago none of these problems existed, and the service worked
like a dream,” says Williams. ’Now the network is overloaded
and everything is running slower and slower.”
The real long-term problem for AtHome is, of course, the public
relations damage that could flow from the situation. The AtHome
cable modem service is not cheap—costing $40 or more per month
on many cable systems. In times of prosperity, when the economy
is booming, people may be willing to tolerate uncertain service
as a trade-off for the ultra-swift Web experience that cable modems
bring when the network is actually functioning properly. As a backstop
against cable modem down-times, customers may even be willing to
maintain contracts with their existing Internet service providers’
“just in case.” But that kind of free spending is certainly
not going to last if the economy weakens. And were that to happen,
it is easy enough to imagine which service would get terminated
by a subscriber if the choice were to come down to (a) a fast and
sometimes unreliable service at a gold-plated price, or (b) a slower
but more reliable provider at a much lower cost.
In that regard, AtHome’s biggest challenge may well come
down to preventing its customer complaints from getting any louder.
But that too may be difficult. Company officials point to data that
shows a tripling of subscriber rolls since June of 1998, accompanied
by a 50 percent decline in the percentage of customers who file
complaints regarding service. But in absolute terms, that means
the total number of disgruntled customers has actually risen. In
other words, the percentage decline in complaining voices may look
good on paper, but in reality—because of the trebled base—it
amounts to an ever growing chorus of disgruntled and angry customers.
What’s more, most of the customer growth has come in just
the last couple of months as the service and support situation has
worsened—which simply means that large numbers of customers
may only now be growing frustrated enough to begin vocally complaining.
The situation appears to be straining relations between AtHome and
at least one major cable system operator: Cablevision Systems Inc.
of Woodbury, Long Island, N.Y. One top official in Cablevision last
week said, ’We are in discussions with AtHome to see that
they meet some minimal standards of support. Otherwise we may cease
providing the service.”
Losing Cablevision would of course be a public relations disaster
for AtHome. And Cablevision hardly dampened speculation when a company
spokesman declined to say anything about the matter beyond a carefully
worded statement, saying, “We are not pleased if any of our
customers are not happy. We are working with AtHome to address these
customer issues.” Officials at AtHome confirmed that such
talks were underway and included a meeting with Cablevision officials
in New York last week. But Robert Tomassi, AtHome’s senior
vice president of operations, characterized the talks as routine
and similar to those that AtHome has been having with other cable
operators as well.
Whatever the impetus for the meetings, AtHome investors had better
hope they lead quickly to greatly improved service—and customer
support to go with it—or this currently high-flying Internet
stock may soon be returning to earth. After all, on the Internet
as anywhere else, getting a customer is only half the battle. After
that you’ve got to keep him.
By Doug Hembruff.
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