Rogers Portable Internet

It’s rare that I do a product review, but this has caused me so much frustration that I just have to document it.

To give you an idea of my numerous conflicts of interest with rogers, I will have to list out the history I had with them. For one thing, it is the only ISP that I believe is not evil. I used to work for their broad band tech support (as a cheap outsourced support). I also signed up for their broad band offer during my university life. I’ve called their support line twice. Once for my own stupidity.

So, when I looked up their offers in Montreal area, I was saddened to find that there’s no broad band service… but there is this neat new service called Portable Internet. Where you get this book sized modem that can be carried to any major city and just work like that. No need to change services ever. I love the mobile lifestyle and this will be an argument for buying a laptop as my next computer.

So being the explorer that I was, I dipped in without looking. What happened later was… intermittent connectivity. Yes, the hardest one to debug. Somehow, I am not surprised. It seems that everything I do now, I am faced with this intermittent connectivity issue. My whole feels like “intermittent connectivity.”

A frustrating 8 days later with me calling tech support to help them rule out all the possibilities. DNS, DHCP, Gateway… My modem was telling me that it had the best connection to the nearest tower the whole time (5 solid green light). So, the only conclusion that they have is that my computer has something bad on it and they’ve been refusing to do anything else after that but to reiterate that there’s nothing wrong elsewhere.

So I promptly plugged in a second computer, tested it, saw the same intermittent problem and canceled the service. By the way, if you are wondering, cancellation took 45 minutes.

It was a novel concept and one that I’ve been waiting forever to come to Canada. In Asia countries, I’ve already seen this about 4 years ago with a PCMCIA card that can be plugged into a laptop. Not the monstrosity that is the modem they gave me.

I feel… I feel like I am living in some backwater country riding on the butt of technological advancement.