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Stouffville Highspeed - Spotty Service

Bshahwu
I'm here a lot

Hello,


We've been experiencing massive issues in Ballantrae in the 48/Aurora Rd area for the past couple days. Internet connection experiences high latency than drops. Modem has to be reset every 10-15 mins.

 

This is a huge problem as many work for home. Myself I have not been able to stay connected to my workplace therefore not able to attend zoom calls and use wifi calling. The bigger problem is if we aren't connected we aren't paid for the time.

 

I've called into tech support several times and its the usual "we dont see any outages" in the area and there is nothing on the community outage form. Tech support said this does not qualify as "outage" to escalate it.

 

This is extremely disappointing as Xmas is coming and many of us working from home have been unable to. Some of us in the area are using up holidays because of the issues.

 

Could someone PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE help us? Its not an isolated incident to myself its our entire area with over 800 people, Ever since a competitor came in to lay fibre its been a huge problem with constant outages/delays etc. PLEASE im begging for a solid/proper response with resolution, it would be nice to earn a paycheque.

 

PLEASE HELP!!

 

 

***Edited Labels***

14 REPLIES 14

Re: Stouffville Highspeed - Spotty Service

Bshahwu
I'm here a lot

Is there any chance anyone from Rogers reads these posts and escalate the issue?

Re: Stouffville Highspeed - Spotty Service

FedUp5000
I plan to stick around

Ive been experiencing issues in this exact area for the last couples MONTHS and it has got uncontrollably bad since this Sunday (completly unusable)...

 

I've called in at least 50 times over the last 2 months. Have had 4 tech visits, 2 maitenance team visits and switched my service from Legacy to Ignite and the problem only continues to get worse...

 

I also have someone in the household who works full time from home whos job may be in jeporady now due to this! 

Re: Stouffville Highspeed - Spotty Service

-G-
Resident Expert
Resident Expert

@Bshahwu wrote:

Is there any chance anyone from Rogers reads these posts and escalate the issue?


The @CommunityHelps team reports trending problems that they see here to their support teams.  You can also ask them to assist with and investigate specific issues by sending them a private message.

 

The Level-1 tech support agents are really only able resolve basic technical problems, or dispatch a field tech to troubleshoot signal-related issues.  They do not have any visibility into node congestion or any upstream issues that could be causing high latency, jitter, or even severe instability -- nothing beyond your modem's connection to the Rogers network.  If your modem's connection is healthy, then they can only tell you that everything looks fine and that they do not see any problems whatsoever.

 

Rogers has also been making upgrades to their HFC infrastructure in and around Markham.  The problems in your area could be because your area needs to be upgraded OR it could be because your area was recently upgraded the the new fibre nodes (and related upstream infrastructure) is now causing performance and stability issues.

 

I would still advise sending a PM to @CommunityHelps and getting them engaged to investigate the problems affecting your area.

Re: Stouffville Highspeed - Spotty Service

Bshahwu
I'm here a lot

I appreciate the reply. This all began in this area when Aecon came in to install fibre for Bell (which was not completed bell terminated the project two weeks later) Rogers had to re-run new drops to many customers in the area due to Aecons negligence. This is not  something that is an upgrade based as I confirmed with a Sr tech last night. They kept referring to it as a "data centre" issue. I would also think perhaps pre-planned "outages" would be communicated as they have been in the past no?

 

The problem is when the level 1 techs tell the end user there is nothing wrong and its "normal" most people especially in this area given that they are all 65+ old believe this., Much like you established above with their ability.

 

The reality is this, this is day 5, modems have to be rebooted every 10-15 mins, latency spikes happen then connection drops. Many work from home, this literally makes it impossible to achieve any work since everything is so reliant on an internet connection these days. People are using their holiday pay in lieu of being able to work. Xmas is coming, people have families, we all know what is going on in the economy.

 

There is no sense of urgency hence the ask if anyone is really paying attention here, its worrisome that there is no sense of urgency, no mention of "outage" no mention of hey were aware of the issue in the area when you call in. NOTHING.

 

We all understand and recognize from time to time connection issues will occur but if you look at this entire area and chronological step through it, it all stems back from when Aecon was laying fibre for Bell. The Aecon installers flat out said to me "its not our problem we do not get locates for drops and other underground cables, we still proceed without full located of mains" I'm one of the few perhaps that can claim for ~15 years it truly was stable and rock solid, perhaps only rebooting the modem 1-2 times on an annual basis.

 

Its terrible that no one from Rogers has even bothered to communicate a plan for resolution. Its not fair or reasonable for paying clients to receive such poor treatment.

 

End of commentary.

Re: Stouffville Highspeed - Spotty Service

FedUp5000
I plan to stick around

The issues in this area have gone on for far longer than since this summer. I've experienced years of issues all of which mostly were happening in the evening during peak hours. Not many people will call and complain becasue as you mentioned alot of the people in the area are seniors and not savy enough to know whats wrong and will just turn it off instead of investigate or call. Alot of these people are using very basic needs internet service and maybe wont even notice latency/slow speeds... But when you have a younger generation who are gaming and streaming the problems become evident very fast. And because no one else from the neighbourhood is complaining they call it a isolated issue when in reality its a area issue that no one speaks up on or has the knowledge to even realize is happening.

 

I've been trying to express to Rogers there is something wrong in the area for a very long time with zero help.

 

I've lived in Ballantrae for over 10 years and there has been issues ever since I moved here on and off.

 

Bell haulted all fibre work because of their battle with the CRTC demanding they share and lease their lines to competitors with a profit cap after putting up all the capital to install them.

Re: Stouffville Highspeed - Spotty Service

-G-
Resident Expert
Resident Expert

@Bshahwu wrote:

I appreciate the reply. This all began in this area when Aecon came in to install fibre for Bell (which was not completed bell terminated the project two weeks later) Rogers had to re-run new drops to many customers in the area due to Aecons negligence.


I don't work for Rogers.  I don't know what is going on in your area, and I can only speculate what is going on based on what I have seen after my node was upgraded.

 

There may be several activities going on simultaneously in your area, for both Bell and Rogers.

 

You are not the first to report problems with Bell's fibre installation crews damaging underground utilities.  They certainly don't care about Rogers or Rogers' customers.  It's also cheaper for them to plow ahead, do the job fast and pay for any damage that they cause than to do the job carefully and properly.

 

This is not  something that is an upgrade based as I confirmed with a Sr tech last night. They kept referring to it as a "data centre" issue. I would also think perhaps pre-planned "outages" would be communicated as they have been in the past no?


When Rogers does a node upgrade, they typically install a new cabinet next to the old node, install and power up the new equipment, then perform a cut-over in the middle of the night during a normal maintenance window.  They won't notify you of any work going on or of any outages.  Very few people within Rogers even have access to those tickets and work orders.  When the NuBuild crews were digging in my area, and installing underground vaults, conduit, cabinets and equipment, my Rogers contacts had no visibility into any of the work that was being done.

 

With the new vCCAP and DAA technologies, many of the functions that used to be performed by dedicated, specialized hardware in the headend are now going to be distributed; either pushed out to the edge of the network or implemented as virtualized services that run on servers in a data centre, including routing.  However, I don't think that Casa's solution is all that stable yet and, for Rogers, it is a totally new way of doing things.  So, yes, many of the ongoing problems can be simply explained away as a "data centre" issue.

 

The problem is when the level 1 techs tell the end user there is nothing wrong and its "normal" most people especially in this area given that they are all 65+ old believe this., Much like you established above with their ability.

 

The reality is this, this is day 5, modems have to be rebooted every 10-15 mins, latency spikes happen then connection drops. Many work from home, this literally makes it impossible to achieve any work since everything is so reliant on an internet connection these days. People are using their holiday pay in lieu of being able to work. Xmas is coming, people have families, we all know what is going on in the economy.


Why are you rebooting your Ignite Gateway every 10-15 minutes?  Does the status LED change from white to flashing amber or flashing green, or turn red?  If not, then it is very likely that you Ignite Gateway has a solid connection to the Rogers network and that your problems are being caused by upstream issues.  This would be consistent with L1 telephone support techs telling you that everything is fine.

 

That said, I have seen severe latency spikes from time to time.  A few months ago, something also happened that caused the Rogers network to suddenly and intermittently stop forwarding network traffic for upwards of 40 seconds at a time.  In this case, it would be natural to want to reboot the modem in response to this... and the problem would go away after... but this was not a "modem problem" so rebooting the gateway would not have accomplished anything.

 

There is no sense of urgency hence the ask if anyone is really paying attention here, its worrisome that there is no sense of urgency, no mention of "outage" no mention of hey were aware of the issue in the area when you call in. NOTHING.


There is definitely a huge sense of urgency to get this resolved.  If this is related to node upgrades, the future of Rogers being able to keep their coax infrastucture semi-competitive with fibre hinges on all of this stuff working.

 

By comparison, Comcast are in the midst of doing similar infrastructure upgrades and have 100000+ Harmonic Ripple nodes in service, and currently rolling out something like 1200 new digital nodes per week.

 

If Rogers' roll-out is being plagued with problems that they and/or their vendor(s) cannot resolve, then they are in deep muck, and so are we as their customers.

 

We all understand and recognize from time to time connection issues will occur but if you look at this entire area and chronological step through it, it all stems back from when Aecon was laying fibre for Bell. The Aecon installers flat out said to me "its not our problem we do not get locates for drops and other underground cables, we still proceed without full located of mains" I'm one of the few perhaps that can claim for ~15 years it truly was stable and rock solid, perhaps only rebooting the modem 1-2 times on an annual basis.


I'm still guessing that Rogers hastily upgraded their infrastructure in your area in response to Bell installing fibre.

 

Its terrible that no one from Rogers has even bothered to communicate a plan for resolution. Its not fair or reasonable for paying clients to receive such poor treatment.


Okay, but the problem still is that Rogers' customer-facing tech support teams are mostly "in the dark", and those that do know about ongoing problems are not authorized to speak publicly.

Re: Stouffville Highspeed - Spotty Service

@Bshahwu you need to be discussing this with the area manager for your particular area, whomever that happens to be.  This is way above tech support, and the fact that they can't recognize damage to the network either means that they're scoped down too far into the weeds to see the big picture, or, that the Management Information Base isn't providing the correct data to enable anyone to recognize a damaged and unstable area.  Take your pick. 

 

We had the same thing happen in our neighbourhood, which historically is rock solid.  Telecon come in to pull fibre for Bell.  Telecon actually did the locates to determine where the cables were, but, then they brought in a trenching machine and trenched their way thru lawns, driveways and multiple Rogers cables, which ended up lying in the street.  So much for the locates.  No doubt several Rogers customers lost service at the time, but even after they were reconnected, there was excessive noise in the system due to the damage.  It took a specialist 2 man crew two weeks, progressing from pedestal to pedestal in order to put the network back together.  

 

I'm assuming that you have underground cabling, or that at least the last portion of it is underground.  One of the problems with pulling fibre is the use of vacuum trucks to remove soil around the pedestals.  Its very easy for the vac truck crew to damage underground cabling, despite the fact that vac trucks should be a better way to do this.  So, you can end up with damage to the RG6 cabling that connects to the houses, damage to hardcable that connects the local tap (pedestal) to the neighbourhood node and damage to your house power cabling (been there, done that, and its no fun when that power cable fails on the coldest day of the year).

 

So, you need to be talking with higher level maintenance staff or the area manager.  Try this:  when you're logged into the forum, follow this link to the moderators page @CommunityHelps.  You will see a link to Send a Private Message.  Follow that link to the message composition page.  The address will fill in automatically.  Fill in the subject line, and details, including your account number.  At some point the moderators will get back to you. 

 

When you're logged into the forum, look for a number overlaying the envelope symbol in the upper right hand corner.  Follow that envelope icon down to the message inbox, and carry on with the discussion.  In short, you need a maintenance crew who can recognize and track down all of the issues caused by the fibre crew, with emphasis on the recognition capability.

 

The next step beyond that is to use the Share a Concern link, to send this up the chain.  

 

Share a Concern - Rogers

 

 

Re: Stouffville Highspeed - Spotty Service

-G-
Resident Expert
Resident Expert

@Datalink wrote:

@Bshahwu you need to be discussing this with the area manager for your particular area, whomever that happens to be.  This is way above tech support

 

We had the same thing happen in our neighbourhood, which historically is rock solid.  Telecon come in to pull fibre for Bell.  Telecon actually did the locates to determine where the cables were, but, then they brought in a trenching machine and trenched their way thru lawns, driveways and multiple Rogers cables, which ended up lying in the street.  So much for the locates.  No doubt several Rogers customers lost service at the time, but even after they were reconnected, there was excessive noise in the system due to the damage.  It took a specialist 2 man crew two weeks, progressing from pedestal to pedestal in order to put the network back together.  


In the Markham / Stouffville area, there is a lot going on.

 

CIK is doing a city-wide SuperFibre rollout.  Bell is (was?) also finally starting to bring their Fibre Internet to my neck of the woods.

 

If fibre crews cause damage and the repairs are not done properly or not all the faults are found, there can be all sorts of problems.  However, tech support should be able to spot signal issues.  If things are bad enough you can get packet loss or worse, the modem's connection to the network can be unstable.  Yes, noise ingress (and signal leakage) can be a problem too.  However, none of these problems should cause latency.

 

As for the HFC upgrades that Rogers is doing, there are ongoing problems.  @RogersAdam  has also been most helpful getting these issues investigated.  The upgraded areas certainly can experience all the problems that @Bshahwu reported.  There are also stability issues that occur from time to time, like when my node started acting weird, then fell flat on its face.

 

Regardless of what is causing the stability and latency issues, I agree, it's going to require escalation.

Re: Stouffville Highspeed - Spotty Service

Mero1
I've been around

I am also have this issue in the same stouffville area. internet keeps droping randomly during the day, and reconnects back after couple mins. Mostly morning time or around 10pmEST. no solution yet, try to phone them and been told everything is normal. dont know what to do. 

Re: Stouffville Highspeed - Spotty Service

-G-
Resident Expert
Resident Expert

@Mero1 wrote:

I am also have this issue in the same stouffville area. internet keeps droping randomly during the day, and reconnects back after couple mins. Mostly morning time or around 10pmEST. no solution yet, try to phone them and been told everything is normal. dont know what to do. 


When you say that your "Internet keeps dropping randomly", is your modem actually disconnecting from the Rogers network (status LED changes from solid white to flashing amber, flashing green, then back to solid white again) or does the status LED remain solid white but the network is totally unresponsive?

Re: Stouffville Highspeed - Spotty Service

FedUp5000
I plan to stick around

The modem light sometimes remains solid but says "connected without internet" on devices, other times will continue to flash white and some other times will do the orange/green/white routine. It's a mix of all 3!

Re: Stouffville Highspeed - Spotty Service

Update. Still status quo. Yet again in the middle of important meeting it drops this morning. On the phone again very politely trying to explain this entire situation yet again. The "manger of tech support" specifically mentioned he wish there was more he could do, didn't seem very interested in escalating the issue. I did ask if there was other avenues we could pursue. I get it if the end user calling in is irate etc, but I was not whatsoever. He did indicate yes indeed he can see many users down and the downtime in the area in recent times.

 

I wish we could get Rogers to listen. Since Aecon has come in the neighbourhood I'm approaching 28 days of downtime if you add it all up. At this point I'm not even worried about a credit, just need someone listen to.

Absolutely disappointing after ~15 years of solid service that its turned out this way.

Re: Stouffville Highspeed - Spotty Service

Hello, @Bshahwu 

 

Thank you for posting your concerns to the community.

 

We definitely want to work with you and try to get the issues you are facing resolved. Please send a private message to @CommunityHelps so we can gather your info and get started. Not familiar with our private messaging system, no worries click here

 

We look forward to hearing from you.

 

RogersTony

 

 

 

 

Re: Stouffville Highspeed - Spotty Service

Update.

 

Internet drops around 9am. Call into rogers, phone tech csr confirms 11/12 modems on the node are indeed down. I ask if someone can come out as this is an outage. The answer is "its early in the morning, we dont seem to have anyone in the area, we cant send a tech to you as its community wide" OK fair.

I ask the CSR if there is any way kindly to escalate this and indeed get the appropriate personal out ASAP. They file another ticket. They were great to work with.

 

Internet comes back up at 12:41PM, OK great i can finally resume work. Drops 3 minutes later. Now its back the experience of modem dropping every 12-15 mins.

 

The CSR even mentioned "wow you have a ton of callins/tickets since September which coreolates with Aecon coming to the area and running fibre on the street and surrounding area.

 

This is so crazy and I feel so helpless. Why wont Rogers deal with this? My neighbours are doing their best to call in and complain as well.

 

This is unreal. I no longer have any holidays to use up and now Christmas is right around the corner.

 

** UPDATE - 2:00PM. ***  Just called in again to discuss the dropping issue that I'm experiencing yet again, I was told yeah they can see it but there is nothing further they can do at this point. they would call me back within 24 hrs to follow up ??

 

I've PM'd the communityhelps person as well

 

PLEASE ROGERS PLEASE HELP. I need to keep food on the table. I'm telling you folks the connection was solid for the last 15 years, RARELY any issue. This is a really tough situation its been ongoing for months now.

 

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