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RBUA
The Residential Broadband Users’ Association
April 5th, 2001
Meeting Attendees from Rogers:
- Edward S. Rogers, O.C., President and CEO, Rogers Communications
- John H. Tory, Q.C., President and CEO, Rogers Cable
- Dermot O’Carroll, Senior Vice President, Network Engineering and Operations, Rogers Cable
- Bill Lukewich, General Manager, Greater Toronto Area, Rogers Cable
- Alek Krstajic, Senior Vice President, Rogers Cable / General Manager, Rogers@Home
- Vic Pollen, Senior Vice President, Rogers Cable / Director of Customer Care and Operations, Rogers@Home
- Taanta Gupta, Media Relations, Rogers Cable
- Peter Anaman, Service Technician, Rogers Cable
- J.T. Pearson, Manager, SMC, Rogers Cable
- Scott Hunter, Vice President, Engineering, Rogers Cable
- Serge Rochette, Vice President, Network Operations, Rogers Cable
Meeting Attendees from the Residential Broadband Users' Association:
- Christopher Weisdorf, President and Technical Director, RBUA
- Scott Brown, Director / Regional Representative for SouthWestern Ontario, RBUA
- Wojtek Zlobicki, Regional Representative for Brampton and Mississauga, RBUA
- Bryan Samis, Senior Member, RBUA
- Jason deCourcy, Senior Member, RBUA
- Rob Borek, Senior Member, RBUA
Rogers Meeting Agenda:
- Network Architecture Issues, Problems and Planned Improvements
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Presented by Dermot O'Carroll, Senior VP of Network Engineering and Operations, Rogers Cable
- Customer Service Issues, Problems and Planned Improvements
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Presented by Vic Pollen, Director of Customer Care and Operations, Rogers@Home
RBUA Meeting Agenda:
1. Local Congestion, Saturation and Overcrowding
- never a problem before the end of August, 2000
- LANCity subscribers have very seldom reported encountering any such problems over the course of our existence
- TL-1000 headend controllers are heavily overloaded in many areas
- too many modems; too few gateways?
- why does Excite@Home, a company roughly 4000 miles away from here, have authority over local provisioning issues?
- distribution circuits still overload at times (re: Kitchener-Waterloo)
- saturation problems affect and hinder virtually every aspect of the service
- dialup can best many of the connections that we’ve dealt with
2. Customer Support Issues
- major problems have been evident since perhaps the April / May period of 2000
- busy signals were, again, never reported before August of 2000
- no busy signals have been reported since the last fiber cut in March; the same goes for excessive (greater than 20 minute) hold times
- trouble tickets are often closed without sufficient investigation and subscribers are never consulted at any point in the process
- any past documentation or call history of the subscriber is wiped clean from the system after a very brief period of time
- support personnel seem to have been systematically trained and conditioned to believe that if there’s a problem, it’s almost always the subscriber’s fault; “regardless of how knowledgeable the subscriber might appear, the problem does not exist with the service, but with the subscriber’s own computer” and “75% of the problems out there are related to subscribers’ own computers, not the service” are applicable quotations for this situation
- subscribers are treated with a lack of respect at times; reports have been received regarding subscribers being accused of lying, among other things
3. Compensation / Credit for Faulty or Nonexistent Service
- unless the subscriber puts up a real fight, credits are either:
- Promised, but never delivered
- Issued, but not in fair or sufficient quantity
- Flat-out denied
- even if clear evidence of the relevant problem(s) are reported, that does not make one more likely to receive compensation
- some support e-mail responses will say “a credit has been applied to your account”, but a quantity is never revealed
- automatic credits never issued for last two fiber cuts
- early 2000 (lack of) mail service credit still never clarified to subscribers
4. Disclosure of Information to Customers
- this leads back to what was said about subscriber call histories, trouble tickets, technician visit reports and other useful items dropping off the face of the earth
- the support site has often only been sporadically updated
- subscribers can’t check back on previous outages or problems because none of them are ever archived
- subscribers have been asking for a network status page for years- will we ever get one?
- information that is actually disclosed, is often devoid of any details or useful data, except for approximate dates, times and locations
5. Server Issues
- DHCP lease times keep changing; servers are currently exhibiting strange behaviour
- DNS resolution sometimes reported as being slow
- mail server performance is much improved, however problems still exist (re: earlier this week)
- @Home IRC server status still officially unexplained
- @Home members.home.com web server on the brink of functionality for over 3 months, before problems are rectified
- time on servers has still not been updated since Daylight Savings at the week’s beginning!
6. Backbone, Peering and Redundancy Issues
- periodic backbone overloading still occurring (re: Sprintlink, TeleGlobe, CANIX / TORIX)
- peering at York Mills now totally gone- what happened?
- when will every headend be on the dual OC-48 ring?
- if backbone redundancy is in place by this September, more than 14 months will have passed since the first fiber cut on July 19th of 2000- too little, too late? Why the ridiculously long wait?
- what is stopping another fiber cut- or two or three- from occurring before redundancy is actually in place 5+ months from now?
7. Shaw -> Rogers Cable Asset Swap and Integration
- when will ex-Shaw subscribers officially be handled by Rogers or Excite@Home?
- at what stage are you, with respect to an IP address block swap with Shaw via ARIN?
- many subscribers with Motorola cablemodems are experiencing the worst service imaginable
- data segment overcrowding is rampant
- the swap has been a great detriment and burden to many of these subscribers in Ontario; the BC transition has gone quite a bit more smoothly
- any light at the end of the tunnel for these newly integrated subscribers?
- will the Motorolas be phased out in favour of another type of architecture?
Estimated duration of meeting: 5 hours
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Prepared by Christopher Weisdorf
President and Technical Director,
Residential Broadband Users’ Association
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