Blessed by the Potato

In a conversation, I don’t know how it got started, we were talking about how crappy Rogers has been treating its high speed customers. They have a monopoly on high speed internet in many areas (because Bell’s DSL is very picky on the acceptable distance to the telephone company and the quality of the line into the house), and let’s face it: even though the government may consider the presence of dial-up as a competitive option and thus don’t regulate Rogers like a monopoly… dial-up is not the same thing at all.

Anyhow, we were whining about the torrent throttling, the increased and spikey ping times from the crappy packet inspection hardware, cancelling newsgroup service, as well as older things like the switch to geocities wbpages and the junky front page, and then having the nerve to follow it all up with a price hike coming in the next few months (as well as the reintroduction of the modem rental fees).

So, one person determined that Rogers is sacrificing the internet quality (with the throttling, etc.) in order to have the upload capabilities for their new home phone service. Basically, Rogers is trying to become the largest telecommunications company there is, and is directly competing with Bell for the phone market now. They did this buy buying up AT&T, Sprint, and Fido, and introducing the digital phones that partially run on their own cable internet network. After spending that much on the phone sector, they don’t have the money or will to upgrade their internet systems, and probably won’t until they absolutely have to (whether it’s because they become even more non-functional as more people with high speed try to do more than just check their email, or because Bell finally gets DSL working at more than 4 km from the telco office and actually offers up some competition in most markets).

Here’s my response to that:

Rogers is exploiting/leveraging their de facto monopoly on high speed/cable internet in order to move into the telephone playground.

Personally, I think it’s really short-sighted of them to be neglecting the cable internet customers and infrastructure as much as they are, and I think it’ll bite them in the rear as soon as a real high-bandwidth alternative comes around, which may be around the corner if a miraculous discovery extending the range of DSL or the quality of phone line it requires happens soon. (if I win a billion dollars in the lottery, I’d totally invest it in building my own fibre optic infrastructure through Ontario to wipe the floor with Rogers just on principle… too bad the odds are low and the payouts only go up to a few million rather than billion)

The home phone sector just doesn’t seem like a big enough prize to sacrifice what was a reasonably decent internet empire for. Sure, everybody has a phone, so the market’s bigger… but in a home phone service, once you have met the not terribly stringent level of voice quality most people expect, and those few add-on packages people want (call display, voicemail, etc.), you’re only competing on price and brand name/corporate trust & service. Things that Rogers is not particularly well known for.

Whereas with high speed internet, you have your peak speeds to go on (or the reliability of those speeds no matter the time of day or neighbourhood), your bitcaps (if any), your ping times/routing, your email servers, your webhosting, newshosting, “premium content”, your network up-time, as well as price, brand name, and level of service (do you have techs just to solve problems, or also ones to help you set up your computer’s software when you get started?).

It just seems to me like a better sector to stay in and dominate properly, than to gut for a stab at an admittedly larger sector that you’re not really suited for.

I have to wonder if Rogers is getting into it just simply to spite Bell for getting into TV with their ExpressVu service.