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Thursday, August 28, 2003
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I was just telling someone a few days ago that I was totally surprised that my Rogers Internet connection has been solid for a while now and that it actually worked through the big blackout and came back up quickly when the power was restored. As far as I can tell it may not have gone down at all except for my modem loosing power after I shut down the UPS.
I knew I should have kept my mouth shut because 2 days ago (Aug 26th) the connection was back to its usual games. Was out from about 8:10am and I called Rogers in the afternoon.
I spoke to David (Rep #2051) and told him I couldn't try anything as I'm not at the location where the modem is. So I said I was just reporting the outage. He supposedly checked the area and said all the other modems appear to be online so probably not a area-wide problem. I said I would beg to differ and then asked about the status of the previous WFR. He said it was still open (so thats over a month of it being open now). He said that it is probaby still open because they want to monitor the connection. I said that is great, can we find out if they are currently monitoring and if they notice the problem now. He said there is no way to contact those techs directly since they are in another department. I kept asking until he said he would update the ticket so that hopefully they will see that and do something.
A few hours after the call the modem was back up and operational. I know because I was monitoring the connection from another location and noticed it come back up. My internal monitoring also showed the outage and when it came back up.
11:00:42 AM 
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Monday, August 04, 2003
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Well, I never did find out what the outcome of the last open ticket was but since an outage from Jun 31th, 3:30pm till Jul 31th, 3pm things have been pretty smooth sailing. As per usual though I'm not holding my breath.
7:51:51 PM
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Sunday, July 27, 2003
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Seems Rogers is having problems with their phone system. Somehow I got to some other tech support area and they had to transfer me over to Internet tech support. The first guy said they are having problems with people being transferred there for some reason. Yes, I called the right number (its programmed into the phone) and pressed the right menu options.
I've been transferred to a a real winner now (Solomen, Rep #808). He took a couple attempts to pull up my account information and once he got that up a couple attempts to get the WFR ticket number input correctly. He says its still pending. Of course there are no notes and he said they usually fix these really quickly and once they do I'll be fine. Ya right, we'll just see about that.
I didn't want to get into much with him so just said that all I wanted was the status on the ticket. He wanted to know if I was having problems and I just said its intermittent connectivity and left it as that.
4:18:04 PM
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Friday, July 25, 2003
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Well, starting at 10:30am today intermittency is back. Its 2pm so I might as well call and see what the status of WSR01153819 is. I was told it was esculated to WFR00253376. This means that there were a number of WSR of the same type and so it gets esculated. He mentioned that as far as the notes say so far that it is a noise issue on one of the routers and that the issue is still pending and being worked on. REALLY, you mean the same noise that has been happening for the past year!!! I guess they might actually be coming around to figuring this out even though I've been telling them this for about a year. Then again, they'll probably fix it temporarily again and forget all about it.
I guess its a wait and see.
2:08:45 PM
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Wednesday, July 23, 2003
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Just as an update the majority of the intermittency subsided yesterday around 10:30am. I called today to see what the status of the ticket WSR01153819 is. It still seems to be open and has gone over to the network group. I guess we'll call tomorrow and see if anything has changed. The rep said they may just be tracking it at the moment.
11:17:50 AM
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Monday, July 21, 2003
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Well I guess Adam (the supervisor from the previous call) was completely wrong about the last time hopefully solving this problem once and for all. I told him then how likely that was.
Intermittency started as of 6:45am this morning and got worse until it was unusable around 8:50am. So I called Rogers once again and spoke to Jon (Rep #F511). We went through all the usual steps and he was finally convinced that there was some noise issue or some strange issue outside the house. Nothing new to me of course.
He also sent it directly to networking instead of sending out a technician. So at the very least he gets high praise for that. Ticket number WSR01153819 was generated. He said he put in the notes that this is a CHRONIC issue so that might mean it gets resolved a bit sooner but probably not.
Update: Since about 11am the connection has been solid so perhaps someone got wind of the ticket and actually did something. This leans me towards someone actually doing something like resetting a router or some device from remote.
Update: Scratch that. We are back to the intermittent bumpy road once again since about 12:30pm.
10:36:04 AM
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Thursday, July 17, 2003
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As I suspected nobody called to provide me with a pager number so I called Rogers Tech support today and spoke with the first level tech Joey (Rep #F517). I explained the situation and he went off to try to find out who was supposed to call me back. He couldn't really come up with anything other than they should have called me so I asked for a supervisor and spoke with Adam (Rep #4641).
Adam went away and talked with their dispatch and said it was referred off to Futureway as far as they could tell to call me back. So supposedly a person from Futureway would call me back but doesn't look like that is going to happen. I asked to speak with someone in their dispatch or maintenance department in order to find out who exactly was to call me back but he said he doesn't have a number or contact name (or wouldn't give me one) to call. He could provide me with a Futureway number but again not a specific person's number or even a name. I would just be given the main Futureway tech support number. Thats pretty much useless to me as I'm sure I wouldn't be able to track down who is responsible.
Speaking of Futureway, I found it hilarious that I received some junk mail the other day advertising their local telephone service. They seem to be calling themselves FCI Broadband now. Maybe to distance themselves from the Futureway name since I heard they are going out of business. BTW, if you are thinking about their phone service don't even bother. At least when it initially went in this area, there were people around without phone service on a regular basis. I wouldn't doubt if that has continued. I haven't had a day of outage with Bell Canada service since the lines were put in.
12:57:40 PM
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Monday, July 14, 2003
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The technician did show up earlier (just getting around to posting this tonight).
Didn't really determine anything but checked things in detail. For some reason he didn't like the power adapter for the cable modem so he replaced it. Also he didn't like the way the grounding was done at the connection from the street to the outside of the house and fixed that.
However he wasn't too convince that either of these were really had anything to do with my overall problems and is pretty convinced its the equipment out on the street somewhere. He is supposed to have a maintenance tech give me his pager number so that I can have him look into the problem as it is happening. Not that they don't know where it is since they have fixed it maybe 20 times now this year alone. But anyway, we'll see if I actually get a phone call and the actual pager number. Might possibly finally getting somewhere but I'm not holding my breath.
10:41:44 PM
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Well it is well past the time a technician was supposed to show up. 2 hours past in fact.
I called Rogers to see whats up and spoke to Kurt (Rep #E871). He went away for a few minutes and looked into the issue and said that a technician was out on Sat. and fixed the problem out on the street somewhere and should have called to let me know. He might have been doing that but I bet I can piece together exactly what happened. As per my previous post, he called but I missed the phone. He was probably just calling to let me know the issue was resolved (just like the other 20 or so times!!). Then he most likely cancelled the service call (note, I DID NOT CANCEL IT). Then a Rogers person who follows up with the customer left me a voice message that the service call would have to be rescheduled since all they saw on it was that it was cancelled.
Anyway, Kurt said there was no technician booked for today or no indication that there was one booked. He said at first actually that there is no indication that I called on Sat. at all. Of course, I've heard all this before and explained to him that this is not new to me. I said, I've heard a number of times from reps over the phone that they don't have call information but were always emphatic that all call information is always logged. I figure they somehow loose 50% of their call information. Anyway, a few minutes later while talking Kurt said here it is. He was completely baffled that the call from Sat. had not shown up before. So who knows if he was looking at the wrong screen or whatever. I just have a feeling that the system there isn't working too well. He didn't bother saying whether he now saw that a technician was booked for today or not and I couldn't care at this time. So we just booked another technician for tonight (if he can make it he will call otherwise it is officially booked for Wed. from 11am-2pm).
What a sorry state of affairs this company is in.
4:33:00 PM
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Saturday, July 12, 2003
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A tech was supposed to show up today (Sat. July 12th) between 2-5pm. They sometimes call beforehand to make sure there is someone home to receive them and I missed the call because I just didn't get to the phone in time. While checking for a voice message the technician must have called back and left a voice message saying the call would have to be rescheduled. Coincidentally the connection was back and solid (and has been pretty much) since a few minutes before the technician initially called.
So, I called Rogers to reschedule and gave them the info on what happened with the phone call etc. Spoke to Guy (Rep #E905). He said that although the connection was back up to have a technician come out anyway (so that I'm not blamed for cancelling the call again). And also to have the technician make sure he raises the issue to maintenance to look into the intermintency regardless of whether the connection is currently working.
So it was rescheduled for Monday, July 14th between 11am-2pm.
6:24:58 PM
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Thursday, July 10, 2003
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The connection has been pretty intermittent over the last 4-5 days but it wasn't until last night around 10pm that it was completely useless until about 3:30am. Was working ok but intermittent again today up until approximately 2pm and has been toast since.
I figured I would call Rogers tech support and go through the same mess as usual. Of course the tech said he could see the modem and the area looks fine. I told him about the intermittency so that he could understand that although he could see the modem right now, in 30 seconds he probably wouldn't. But we went through the power cycling of the modem and as per usual it couldn't get online. Of course, he said it looks to be only an issue with me as the area looks ok.
I finally found out that the reason the area looks ok is because their tools don't seem to do any proactive polling of the modems but rather get a report from the modems on how long they are online. So the modems must push their status up periodically. If you ask me this is a useless mechanism in determining an area wide problem as everything could look fine until someone actually power cycles their modem. I, of course, asked him to look further into the problem on an area wide scale but he didn't seem like he either knew how to or that he required to. He seemed rather green and not like the better techs that actually watch signal to noise ratio's here and there and then determine that it is in fact an area wide problem.
So as usual, I have a tech booked to come out to the house.
The tech (Mike, Rep #8776) also indicated that on a number of previous times their maintenance techs have been cancelled. He said that in all cases they call and that I had cancelled them. I can recall maybe ONCE that I cancelled a maintenance call and it wasn't clear that it was maintenance calling.
So it looks to me like maintenance checks my connection before coming out and when noticing that it is up they cancel themselves. They are obviously either extremely lazy in solving this problem once and for all or are covering their asses as they know this is a problem that they cannot (or don't want to) solve. I've been trying for the last year to get a supervisor through the tech support number to coordinate with maintenance and networking to resolve this issue once and for all. It seems like either there is mass incompetence, disorganization or just plain laziness (most likely all three) in this whole organization. Nobody seems to want to take responsibility for this and they just keep passing the hot potato around while they cover their ass. Pretty soon I'm going to grab that hot potato and there isn't going to be any ass covering that is going to stop it from being rammed.
3:51:49 PM
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Saturday, June 28, 2003
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Well, since the 25th been working with a lot of intermittent outages. Just checked the network monitoring and it looks like it has been out almost completely today from approximately 4pm to 10pm. Good thing I wasn't around trying to use the net otherwise I would be seriously steamed.
Unfortunately I haven't seen more than about 4 hours without some sort of outages in weeks. How do you like that for net service??
10:44:03 PM
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Wednesday, June 25, 2003
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Woke up today to find the Rogers Internet connection to be completely toast. Looks like it started getting bad around 7am and continued almost completely unusable until about 11am. I called Rogers at 9:15am as I was only able to get connectivity for like a few minutes an hour and of course went through the usual about how it is intermittent etc. Spent enough time on the phone with John (Rep #2019) to finally convince him to raise a ticket to engineering/networking but after he did that he did not have a ticket number for me for some reason. I figure he either didn't send it or it was rejected. We also agreed to have a tech sent out to the house to check the line once again after I of course explained that it is useless to do that.
Since 1pm the connection has been solid but we'll see how long that lasts.
3:01:49 PM
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Saturday, June 21, 2003
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Ok, from now on I'm only going to make these Rogers Cable Internet Update posts to the Roger Cable Outages category here so as not to annoy regular readers with this constant babble.
It seems they MAY have fixed the problem sometime last night as the connection was stable from late last evening to around 4am this morning. And then things were intermittent from then till 6am and then nothing until about 1pm. I called around 10:13am and spoke to Pam (Rep #B650) to check on the status of ticket WSR01143572. She said it had been closed and I said really, I'm still not working. She wanted to go through the normal crap of checking my PC etc. but I just said forget it. Now at about 1pm the connection is back up. Probably not for long because they probably haven't actually fixed anything but rather looked at it during the night and determined incorrectly that there was actually no problem.
1:17:25 PM
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Friday, June 20, 2003
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As I predicted in my earlier Rogers Cable Update the net has pretty much gone to crap. Net was down again from 5pm-6pm while I was trying to finish up some work for the day. I figured I might as well call Rogers and let them know and hope that others from the area have called in. Of course the first rep I got on the line was Daren (Rep #E206) and he was able to see my modem however I couldn't get on the net. He suggested I power cycle the modem but I had to get off the phone with him so I did it shortly after that. Of course the modem wouldn't get reconnected so I was hosed.
The second time I called back I got Raheem (Rep #E590) and of course as soon as we got through the introductory crap the modem came online. I told him about the intermittency but of course everything looked fine to him. I said I still couldn't reach anything on the net so we tried some things and in the course of trying the usual stuff he detected intermittent problems in the area. Finally a rep who seems to know what he was doing however it was mostly because he was patient enough to monitor things as we were fumbling around trying other stuff. Of course usually I try to get off the phone quicker as I know its a problem out on the street that they just can't detect. This time at least he was convinced it was a problem out on the street so raised a ticket to the network engineers (ticket num: WSR01143572). Now it is just a matter of time waiting for some bozo to go flip and switch and reset something. At least that is usually what happens.
6:56:16 PM
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Since the major problems in April and May, June has been relatively smooth sailing. I say relatively because for the most part the connection has been up with only small minute or two outages here and there. However I've noticed over the last couple of days that there have been more outages and for slightly longer periods of time. For example, yesterday June 19th, there were intermittent outages between 1:30pm-2:00pm, 9:45pm-10pm (almost completely out). Today there were outages between 6:30am-7:00am, 12:15pm-2:15pm (almost entirely down). Good thing it was solid from 10am-noon when I was in an online Webex meeting. And now it is intermittent again while I'm writing this around 2:45pm. This is no doubt a sign that I'll be having problems over the weekend.
There isn't much sense in calling Rogers about this as I won't be able to convince them to watch the line for a while as they don't understand what intermittent means and even if they do see something they'll just want to send someone to check the cable modem instead of checking the router where the problem is no doubt showing itself for something like the 20th time in the past year.
2:50:42 PM
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Wednesday, May 28, 2003
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Rogers Cable Internet connection went out again today from 11:45am to 12:32pm and is extremely intermittent at the moment. So intermittent in fact that getting email or trying to get to a webpage is almost impossible. Dialup would be much faster at this point.
Update: Seems the connection is pretty much back to normal now (has been since about 12:45pm). However I'm not able to reach a ton of sites on the net right now even from remote boxes I'm ssh'ed into. Very strange.
12:39:19 PM
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© Copyright
2004
Tim Aiello.
Last update:
5/22/2004; 3:25:26 PM.
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