Rogers Outage

[sc:internet-category ]In my recent post about building an emergency server I mentioned I had lost Internet access for a week.  Here’s a little background on the issue and my experience with Rogers.

Only Dec 21st, 2012 a huge ice storm came through southern Ontario and I lost power for 25 hours.  This wasn’t a big deal and when power came up the next night everything was fine with the internet connection.

However, overnight as power was being restored, a branch came down and hit the cable line to my house.  It didn’t take the line down, but it was stretched several feet lower than it was the day before.

Everything functioned reasonably well, but I was getting intermittent drops.  This wasn’t surprising as power was still down for hundreds of thousands of people.

Things continued for a while, I had a significant outage of about 6 hours one day, but other than that it was fine.

Until December 30th, when I arrived home the internet was down and it didn’t come back up.  I called Rogers and they couldn’t connect to the modem, or anyone else in the area so they opened a ticket and scheduled an appointment.

Still getting through the backlog, my appointment date was for Jan 6th, a week later…

Having my mail server at home meant I had to get an alternate site up and running which wasn’t much of an issue.  I called back in to Rogers to confirm I was still down the next day and they also confirmed the rest of the area was back up.

At this point the support rep from Rogers also wanted me to swap out the modem, in case that was the issue.  I dropped by my local Rogers store and got them to swap out the modem, and that’s where the problems really started.

Once I arrived at Rogers to swap the modem, I found out they don’t make the modem I have anymore, that wasn’t very surprising and they brought out a new DOCSIS modem for me.  They activated it and while we were talking the subject of my current plan came up.  Turns out the new modem didn’t support the plan I had and so there was a different modem I needed.

However the other modem was a router/wireless unit as well and cost more per month, which I didn’t want to pay so I said I’d purchase the unit instead.

This seemed to confuse them and after talking to their manager it turns out they didn’t have a modem for purchase available, only a rental unit.

After going back and forth for a while they suggested I take the rental unit and then call in to customer service, which could ship me a unit to purchase.

Getting home and setting up the modem proved out that it wasn’t the modem, which I knew, but sometimes you just have to play along to get through to the next step 😉

I called in to customer service and it turns out they can’t ship me one, well they can but there’s a $49.95 charge… I really do hate Rogers.

There was nothing to do but wait for the service call… and setup the new modem/router.

The new router was pretty straight forward, kind of bland looking as far as the web interface goes but functional.  The one issue I had with it was that I use port 8080 for an OpenVPN server, however the router uses port 8080 for its management interface and you can’t disable/redirect it.  In the end I changed OpenVPN to port 943 and everything was up and running.

A week later the Rogers tech showed up, found no signal at the house, went to the pole and promptly started taking the cable down 🙂

3 hours later, all was good and things were back up and running.

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Greg

Greg is the head cat at JumbleCat, with over 20 years of experience in the computer field, he has done everything from programming to hardware solutions. You can contact Greg via the contact form on the main menu above.

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Greg

Greg is the head cat at JumbleCat, with over 20 years of experience in the computer field, he has done everything from programming to hardware solutions. You can contact Greg via the contact form on the main menu above.