Rogers screws me again...

A while back (quite a while ago actually) I made the switch from Bell Mobility to Rogers as my cell phone service provider. The switch was driven, in large part, by the fact that Rogers had all the 'cool' phones. At the time I wanted a RAZR and also at the time, Bell didn't have a CDMA version of the RAZR. Anyways, I made the switch.

Immediately I noticed that I no longer got any reception when I was at work - Nortel Carling campus in Ottawa. A bit of time passed, and Rogers showed up at a booth in the cafeteria at work - encouraging people to sign up with them. I went down and asked if they had plans to improve their coverage, seeing as it was so crappy. I was assured that yes, there were plans to improve it within the next few months. That was about two years ago.

I was in possession of the name (and email address) of someone in Rogers, because of other issues I had, and decided to send them an email to see if they knew anything about coverage improvements at the Nortel campus in Ottawa. I sent that email on October 17, 2007. I immediately got a response saying that "Rogers and Nortel have agreed to move forward with implementation of a Rogers cell site on the Nortel Carling Campus... Funding has been approved by our Finance department and implementation will happen in the coming months. We are targeting end of January timeframe."

The end of January rolled around and I hadn't noticed any improvements so I sent another email, and got the following response: "Hello Kevin, There are definitely plans to improve coverage on the Nortel Campus. Funding has been approved but there are still some issues to be worked on both sides regarding the cell site leasing agreement, which delays things a bit. For more information, please contact from Nortel..." I did just that, and got a response saying that they had an approved plan, but that there were a couple of issues they were addressing and that they were targetting 'late spring' of this year for implementation.

At the end of March I asked for an update to see if things were still on track. I was told that , "The engineering aspect is fine , now the issue is around finical commitments and some legal items have stalled the process." That's wasn't sounding good.

It's coming up on 'late spring' now so I thought I'd send off another email to see if I could get an update. I received the following: "Kevin: Well, I am sorry to say this is not a good news story. The bottom line here is the project at this stage is dead due financial restraint and service contractual commitments. Right now it appears that the Rogers cell service shell not improve."

Financial restraint?! I'm confused - way back in October I was told that funding had already been approved. (sigh) This seems to be yet another example of Rogers screwing over its customers. I'm not surprised, but I am disappointed.