Internet migration proves difficult for Rogers, easier for Shaw and others

The rapid demise of American cable Internet access provider Excite@Home has caused problems for users north of the border as most major Canadian cablecos have provisioned services from the bankrupt U.S. firm. For several weeks now they have been scrambling to shift email addresses from the @home domain, but some cablecos have been better prepared than others. Least prepared for the switch was central Canadian giant Rogers Communications Inc., which apparently ignored warning signs and continued to use @home, even though it had been told to get ready by customer groups. "They’ve been committed to sticking with @Home through thick and thin," Chris Weisdorf, the president and technical director of the Residential Broadband Users’ Association, tells Network Letter. "I expressed concerns about @Home’s viability back in November of last year. I said that it wouldn’t last. I’ve been asking Rogers to scale back their agreement with @Home, or get more control over the services since 1999." Despite that badgering, Weisdorf says the company still operated with its head in the sand. The RBUA, which regularly lobbies the company with concerns from its customers (NL, Apr. 9/01), met with senior executives of the Toronto-based cableco last August. "I said there’s a very good chance @Home won’t last the year," he adds. " ‘What are you going to do about that?’ ‘Do you have a contingency plan in place?’ They said they believed there was no chance that @Home would not last, that they would last, but they did have a contingency plan, at least that’s what they said." Weisdorf has not had any more face-to-face discussions with Rogers since then. But on Nov. 21, the RBUA and the cableco held a conference call to discuss problems of migration. The company told the group it has a backup transit link to Teleglobe and that it was negotiating private peering arrangements with Canadian and American ISPs. Officials from Rogers were not available to comment by deadline. A spokeswoman for the company said someone may be able to provide details within two weeks. The firm has been busy using newspaper ads, news releases, and its own community cable channels and web site to update customers on the transition. New agreement reached At press time, Rogers announced that it had reached a three-month transitional agreement with Excite@Home to continue to use its network. Under the agreement, which is subject to court approval in the U.S., Rogers will pay US$15 million to cover all services during the transition period. The deal will allow Rogers to transition its high-speed customers to its own network gradually over a period of weeks. In the Dec. 4 news release, Rogers noted that its new high-speed network is now in place and consists of a regional data centre to provide Internet services such as email and news, an extensive regional Internet protocol network riding over Rogers’ fibre network connecting all of its cable systems, and connectivity to the global Internet backbone. The cableco also noted that 70 per cent of its high-speed customers had been converted to the rogers.com email domain, up from about 50 per cent noted in a Nov. 29 release. The company had set a deadline of 10 p.m. Nov. 30 to complete the migration. Some Rogers customers did lose their service for a few hours that night, but officials at the cableco insist the problem was rectified quickly. Throughout the ordeal, Weisdorf charges that the cableco has not been providing accurate information to its beleaguered customers. He reports receiving emails from eight RBUA members who were unable to use the settings as described on the customer support site. Most of those distraught users were subscribers to the Lancity servers. Weisdorf estimates that thousands of people are logged on through the hub he uses, at Yonge and Eglinton in Toronto. It is one of 17 hubs using Lancity. RBUA members have been complaining about speed decreases in the last few weeks. Rogers said it was unaware of any problem but it would investigate. The RBUA president is surprised that Rogers continues to use @Home name servers to provision its Lancity subscribers. He suggests the company should have contacted rival suppliers like Motorola and Terayon to provide alternative service.He notes that Rogers is busy upgrading facilities in the areas that were formerly controlled by Shaw Communications Inc. (The two companies swapped cable systems last year). Rogers expects to be deploying DOCSIS throughout the area by next February. Shaw has easier time Things have been less stressful for customers of Canada’s second-largest cableco. Shaw has been moving people off the @Home service and on to its own pipe for months. President Peter Bissonnette reports few problems with the transition. "It’s going delightfully well. We’re about 95 per cent complete and those that haven’t converted yet, we still get 3,000 or 4,000 a night that are converting," he tells Network Letter. "If @Home should cease service, most of the ones that are left over now are customers that might have an alternate email provider like Canada.com or hotmail." Shaw has been so well prepared for the move that it has been sounded out by other cable companies who are affected by the @Home meltdown. American cablecos Cox Communications and Comcast have paid visits to the Shaw data centre to see how the migration was being handled. "We’ve been involved with Rogers for the last year and a half letting them know what we’re doing, just so they were aware of what the alternative was. Cogeco – I think they’re done now," Bissonnette notes. "But they all have various degrees of reliance. Cox and Comcast are still on the @Home backbone, so connectivity could be an issue for them. But we’ve been on our own backbone now for four years. And we’ve been provisioning our own customers for the last year and a half. Our last remnant is just email. We have the least reliance, and have had the least reliance on @Home for some time." That reliance is the core of Rogers’ dilemma, the RBUA’s Weisdorf believes. "If Rogers had managed to get all the Lancity subscribers on to their own domain name servers there wouldn’t be this problem," he states. "But because they’re still running basically on all of @Home’s stuff…that’s why they’re having a lot of the problems. I don’t know why the Lancitys are still on @Home’s name servers, and on @Home’s DHCP servers, but they still are and that’s contributing to a lot of problems and I assume a lot of call volume on their support line." Bissonnette hinted at the same point in an earlier interview with Decima Publishing. "They’ve got a very different platform and different reliance on @home. We don’t have any backbone connectivity with them. We don’t have any provisioning whereas Rogers do, so their was a bit more challenging. We were able to wean ourselves from that over the last two years." Shaw has over 600,000 cable modem clients spread out over the four western provinces and Northern Ontario. Rogers covers the eastern part of the country and has 422,000 Internet customers. Cogeco and Vidéotron share the rest of the major market, with smaller companies filling in the remainder. Judge rules for @Home The entire @Home system across North America is in jeopardy following the parent company’s bankruptcy application in November. Late on Nov. 30, San Francisco judge Thomas Carlson ruled that the parent, Excite@Home of Redwood City CA, could terminate its contracts with cablecos throughout its serving area and renegotiate them. The American judge sidestepped the question of whether the service could be shut down, but several large cablecos in the U.S. had threatened to cut off the pipe if the contracts were renegotiated. The firm services over 4 million American consumers as well as the Canadian clients. Weisdorf considers the collapse of the American access provider as a debacle for all concerned. "Sticking with @Home has not rewarded anyone in any way. It’s only hurt people, in my opinion," he offers. "It’s hurt the employees of Rogers, it’s hurt shareholders of Rogers, it’s hurt the customers of Rogers. You know it’s hurt Rogers, their own image, because of all that negative press coverage – the worst press coverage since negative option billing. So they got nothing out of that deal with @Home."

Internet migration proves difficult for Rogers, easier for Shaw and others

News | 12/05/2001 5:00 am EST

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