Rogers that

Anybody living anywhere in Canada knows the difficulty of working with Rogers, or Shaw, or whatever cable company has the quasi-monopoly in their area. Customer service is horrid--a handful of agents know what they're doing and genuinely try to help, but the vast majority of calls to Rogers involve a tricky automatic menu navigation, a lengthy spell on hold, and agents who tell you that your problems will be solved by upgrading to a more expensive cable package.

Such is what I was expecting Monday when I called Rogers to move to a cheaper Internet package--nobody's going to be living at the house I've been renting for school over the summer, so it didn't make sense to pay for 60 GB of bandwidth each month.

That's another thing--you have to call them. The Internet is an amazing thing--through it we can cancel a newspaper subscription, order a pizza, even file our taxes--yet with Rogers, you can't even make choices about your Internet service online.

Well, not can't so much as couldn't. As I learned when I went into Rogers' website to compare Internet packages before calling them (because you can save yourself a lot of frustration by knowing exactly what you want), you can now make changes to your Rogers services through the Rogers website. Internet, home phone, cell phone, TV, it's all there.

Of course, there's a catch. You can only upgrade your services online; you can only make changes if they result in even more money being forked over to Rogers. If you want to save any money or remove any services, you still have to call, where you will no doubt be offered incentives and incomprehensibility to try and get you to remain at your current level of Rogers money-forking-over-to.

I'd say that this horrid customer service is okay, because Rogers is digging their own grave, but that's not really the case--they have such a monopoly over content distribution that it's impossible to imagine life without them (or Shaw, Bell, etc.).

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lol, Habs.

--Ryan