Good news for Look:
No quick fix expected for Rogers@Home customers
John Partridge 03:44 EDT Wednesday, October 18, 2000
Rogers Communications Inc.and its U.S. supplier of high-speed Internet services are both eating crow over an epidemic of "download rigor mortis" that continues to afflict thousands of Rogers@Home customers.
However, both companies indicated yesterday it will likely be several weeks before they can make the system more reliable and that it could be the new year before they have enough capacity to deal with anticipated growth.
"The problems we have faced on e-mail are not Rogers' technical issues, they're ours," said Michael Foley, president of Excite@Home Canada Inc., the Canadian unit of the U.S. company that supplies high-speed Internet services to Rogers and other Canadian cable companies such as Shaw Cablesystems GP and Cogeco Cable Inc.
"We have dropped the ball on a number of occasions over the last couple of weeks. . . . We have caused some pain to the users of the @Home service -- and that's a bad thing."
However, Rogers@Home spokeswoman Taanta Gupta said it, too, is to blame. "I'm not going to say to our customers 'well, it's somebody else's problem,' " she said. "It's our problem."
The Globe and Mail reported Saturday that many of the approximately 300,000 customers Rogers@Home has in Ontario and B.C. had been afflicted by spotty or non-existent e-mail and Internet access, in some cases for up to six days.
Rogers attributed the problem to much higher-than-expected subscriber growth during the normally slow third quarter, a technical foul-up by its own engineers and a major hardware failure at Excite@Home's California offices.
Officials of Calgary-based Shaw could not be reached yesterday but said Friday their @Home customers have not faced similar problems. A spokeswoman for Cogeco, of Montreal, said yesterday that its customers have also emerged unscathed.
After service interruptions last February, the spokeswoman said, Cogeco reconfigured its @Home service so that it now uses "mainly our own servers."
However, Mr. Foley appeared to cast doubt on the notion that the troubles have been confined to Rogers@Home customers. "When an e-mail server goes down, most of the time it is serving the clients of more than one cable company."
Mr. Foley also said the problems stem from the fact that Excite@Home is in the process of changing how it delivers e-mail, but that the company expects most of this work to be done "in the next two or three weeks."
In addition, the company is building a "significant service management centre" in Toronto at a cost of about $30-million, the first such centre it has built outside the United States.
Excite@Home expects the centre to be open by the end of this year to manage e-mail traffic for both Eastern Canada and the eastern United States, he said, adding that it should "provide us with the capacity and redundancy not to see this happen any more."
On its own, Rogers@Home has ordered an additional server to handle e-mail traffic and hopes to have it installed "within a couple of weeks," Ms. Gupta said.
However, she wouldn't commit to any firm date by which the company expects to have the e-mail service up to the standard it has set of being 99-per-cent reliable.
"All I can say is that we continue to do the best we can, and I realize it certainly isn't enough for our customers, but I can't make a commitment that everything is going to be reliable in two weeks."
One difficulty, she said, is that the problems are intermittent in different service areas, rather than being a "system outage."
Rogers@Home customers who have been able to get through by e-mail to The Globe this week have complained of being unable to reach the service's toll-free customer service line at all or of being kept on hold for long periods.
However, Ms. Gupta said the company is not increasing staff at the Toronto call centre that deals with these calls. "You can't just go and hire people for the call centre," she said. "They have to be trained and that takes some weeks." |
