Goodbye Telus!
IF your home is covered by Rogers cell network, there is now a viable, affordable alternative to the Telus landline,
It's called the Rogers Wireless Home Phone. NOT trying to sell anyone on this - just wanted to share our experience using it for a month now.
It uses a small, stationary cell phone receiver that you plug your regular home phone into (instead of the Telus wall jack).
Advantages:
- use your existing phone and keep your current phone number (yes, keep your 333 number!) Service is nearly indistinguishable from landline.
- cheaper than Telus (we pay only $10/month, but regular rate is $25/month compared with $45 we used to pay for similar service from Telus)
- includes voicemail and unlimited Canada-wide calling (no long distance charges for calls in Canada!!!). No limits (it is not a cell phone plan - it works like a regular home phone)
- receiver unit gives very good signal - much better reception and clearer connection than our cell phone from same location
- Rogers will let you try it for a month with a temporary phone number and return the unit if it doesn't work for you
Drawbacks:
- uses cell phone technology - this means you have a cell receiver on in your house at all times, like having a cell phone on all the time (although at least it's never near your head)
- one-time $35 cost to purchase the receiver (charged after first month of use)
- small (very small) continuous electrical load required to power the receiver unit (although it has a built-in rechargeable battery backup, so phone does work even when your inverter is off)
- it is NOT a mobile phone - it is stationary, intended to be used from a fixed location
Of course cell technology is not foolproof - the phone can go out if the cell network is interrupted. Then again, that won't happen just because someone was digging a ditch up the road, and it does not require a crew to come to Lasqueti to fix. I'm hoping (and expecting) the service to be much more reliable - so far it has been solid.
You can find all the details here: http://www.rogers.com/web/content/wirelesshomephone
We were reluctant to leave our landline behind, especially since we know there are Lasquetians who rely on the Telus landline infrastructure. To those, we are sorry to jump ship, but we just could not handle the recurring, lengthy service interruptions, so, Goodbye Telus.
Comments
Revenge of the Telus !!!
Better hold off on jumping the Telus ship just yet if you were so inclined by my review.
The system does NOT receive calls from Telus 333- numbers!
Sean L. confirmed that, when called by 333- locals, his Rogers phone also gives "This number not in service." BUT when we call each other's Rogers 333- locals, no problem.
I THINK this is a result of porting our 333- number to Rogers (system may work fine with 240- local) - I strongly SUSPECT this is an issue with the Telus - Lasqueti 333- local rather than with the Rogers phone (wonder what made me think that?)...
Telus! oh the tyranny!
Stay tuned next week for the next installment of ... The Call-Centre On-Hold Blues.
My Experience with Rogers Call Centre
Like Telus, Rogers is a big media corporation, with millions of customers and huge, faceless call centres staffed with their front-line customer support staff. I've spent a couple hours now, being transferred around Rogers' "Customer Care", speaking with various "consultants" about the strange issue with our new phone.
To my great surprise, this has not been a wholly unpleasant experience. Without exception, every person I spoke with at Rogers listened carefully to my issue, asked helpful, clarifying questions to ensure they understood the problem, and then helped me get in touch with someone further "along the chain" who might actually help resolve this pretty obscure technical glitch. Each rep. I spoke with, I found later, had made fairly detailed notes about our conversation and what had been done thus far to try to resolve it, so I didn't need to start at square 1 with each new person I spoke with.
The first "Customer Care" rep I spoke with immediately refunded everything I had paid for the service - I had only asked to not be billed again until it was resolved, he insisted that I should not pay for a service that was not fully functional. He refunded my first 2 months on the spot.
When I finally reached a "Tier 2" tech support person, she was extremely competent and professional, and she helped me run some additional tests to narrow down the problem. Within a few hours, I got a call back from a technician to confirm he was working on fixing the problem, and that he would call me back when it was fixed or within 72 hours to give me a status report. Pretty good service, I thought, for a $10/month customer.
For close to 20 years I've been dealing with funky Telus service (our previous place had a similar "wire strung through the forest" service). Thus, I've spent hours and hours being passed around their call centre trying get help. It was a very rare occurrence to ever talk to anyone who seemed to have any knowledge whatsoever about my problem, nor who gave a flying fig about anything except to get me off the phone ASAP **.
They seem to have a different culture at Rogers. Yes, it is still a big, faceless call centre, with all the attendant frustrations that can bring, but I honestly got the feeling, from every person I spoke with at Rogers that they were genuinely concerned that I had a problem and they honestly wanted to help make it right to the best of their abilities. I'll withhold final judgement until I see how they resolve this problem, but so far, I'd say if you have been frustrated by the Rogers call centre, then you probably just haven't spent enough time trying to deal with Telus.
** Note: to be fair, the Telus technicians - the crew from Parksville who actually service our landlines - have always been competent, caring, and very pleasant to work with. They tend to go above-and-beyond their duty, in our experience. If Telus had more employees like these fine folks, I'm sure it wouldn't be such a pain to deal with.
A Christmas present from Rogers...
It took a little more than 72 hours - more like a month all told - but a few days ago we started receiving calls from the 333- exchange - yay!
During that month, we received several calls from a Roger's service technician working on the problem. In between, there were long delays while Rogers waited for Telus to respond to a query or work on the issue from their end.
Despite the fact that it took a month to resolve this issue, I remain quite impressed with Rogers service dept. This was obviously a very tricky and localized technical problem, affecting only 2 of their customers. Yet, from what I could tell, they took the matter seriously and were working diligently to resolve the issue with Telus - not once did they say "this is not our problem, it is Telus, take it up with them" - they did all the legwork to interface with Telus to resolve the problem, involving us only to run some tests and confirm whether or not the phone was working yet.
We are still sitting tight before making a full endorsement here - we want to be sure that
1) Sean's phone is also working; and
2) there are not other similar issues
Being a bit of a nerd, I'm also quite curious about what caused the problem and how they fixed it. If I ever find out, I'll post it here.
Until then - happy phoning!!
All systems go!
8 months later, and not a hitch. The phone has worked flawlessly, and we've already saved hundreds of $$. Really could not be happier with this service - fully recommended.
Just wanted to add that you
Just wanted to add that you can get a 333 number on the fido or rogers home phone even if you didn't previously have one. Get a neighbour or friend with a 333 telus line to add another 333 phone number to their account(it doesn't cosrt anything, it's another number on the same house and it would double ring if anyone were to phone it) and then tell rogers to phone them when setting up the cell/home phone to release the phone number to port it to the new cell/home phone.
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