Rogers
@Home, the Canadian importer of Excite@Home’s co-branded high-speed Internet service, provides cable modem access for nearly 300,000 users —
many of which were impacted by intermittent problems with their high-speed
Internet services during the past month.
Chris Weisdorf, Rogers@Home User’s
Association president and technical director, said the service has been
in a shamble over the past three weeks.
“E-mail, DNS and DHCP services — the dynamic host configuration protocol
that subscribers use to obtain IP addresses and other info, have been
highly erratic,” Weisdorf said.
Part of the problem is that users have to change their configuration from a
static, to a dynamic IP address. The adjustment is the result of
Rogers@Home system upgrade. Customers were not notified of the change, so
users with static IP addresses could not connect to the system, or were
booted off the system altogether.
Right about the time Rogers@Home technical support was reeling with calls
about connectivity, the e-mail system crashed and nobody could get through
the overtasked phone lines.
Taanta Gupta, Rogers@Home spokesperson, said technicians are working around
the clock to resolve the connectivity problem and that e-mail services have
already been restored.
“We have been upgrading our system to add capacity since January,” Gupta
said. “Recently, we’ve faced two problems as a result of the upgrade.
E-mail services were disrupted and some customers experienced intermittent
connectivity problems.”
Gupta said Excite@Home technicians worked with Rogers to repair the e-mail
problem over the weekend.
“While Rogers@Home was working on the system upgrade, it was off-loading
Canadian e-mail services to Excite@Home’s Redwood City, CA facilities,”
Gupta explained. “The problem was a software issue, which was repaired with
a patch over the weekend.”
Allison Bowman, Excite@Home spokesperson, confirmed that the e-mail bugaboo
has been squashed.
“Canada was in the middle of an upgrade to improve its performance,
migrating from a distributive architecture to a centralized system,” Bowman
said. “Friday we determined the root cause of the e-mail problem, Saturday
we patched it and e-mail services have been stable for three days.”
A new DHCP server bound for Rogers@Home passed through customs late
Wednesday. Working in tandem with the e-mail off-load to US servers, Gupta
believes that increased capacity the server provides will stabilize the
system and allow the firm to continue migrating users from its legacy system.
In the meantime, Rogers@Home is asking that users e-mail the company to
receive credit for downtime — rather than sit in queue for up to an hour
on customer services phone lines demanding credit be applied to their
accounts.
RHUA’s Weisdorf said that during the peak of users’ frustrations in
mid-October, most customers experienced 45-minute hold-times — if they
were fortunate enough to get through to the service department in the first
place.
“We are asking customers not to phone the call center, but e-mail us
instead,” Gupta said. “We will look at each of those e-mails on a
case-by-case basis. These were intermittent problems, and many of our
customers were not impacted, so we are not going to give a blanket
refund. We are going to follow our regular credit policy.”
Ted Rogers, Rogers Communications chief executive officer, compounded the
company’s reputation for poor service when he refused to answer reporters’
questions after reporting a sizable third-quarter profit.
Rogers showed little remorse about the company’s Internet problems,
attributing them to the company’s position on the
cutting edge of
technology. He said “there is no need to apologize for pioneering new
services in Canada far ahead of what its American colleagues are doing.”
By following standard credit procedures during a period of sub-standard
service Rogers@Home has managed to make a bad situation, worse.
Rogers has been offering Canadians cable modem connectivity for the past
five years. As a pioneer in the industry, one would think that the company
knows how to take care of its customers during a service crisis.
Ignoring customer’s demands from the top down will not make Rogers@Home
technical glitches disappear. It will however, make customers vanish.
RHUA’s Weisdorf said the company keeps making promises to improve its
service, but things don’t improve.
“Users’ only recourse is to drop the service,” Weisdorf said. “They are
denying credit left and right. In the past, they used to cooperate. Now,
customers can ask for credit all they want, but they don’t always get it.”
Patricia Fusco is associate editor of ISP Planet.
