Just a few weeks after announcing $2 rate increases on most tiers of the company’s broadband service, Rogers Communications has announced speed upgrades and tiny increases in usage allowances for certain customers:

• Express: download speeds will increase from up to 12Mbps to up to 18Mbps and data allowance will increase from 60GB to 70GB.
• Extreme: download speeds will increase from up to 24Mbps to up to 28Mbps and data allowance will increase from 100GB to 120GB.

These enhancements apply to customers utilizing Rogers DOCSIS 3.0 capabilities. Rogers will start rolling out the faster speeds to existing Express tier customers currently receiving download speeds of up to 12 Mbps starting January 26^th and will continue over the following weeks. New customers will experience faster speeds beginning February 21^st. All new and existing customers will benefit from higher data allowances starting March 8^th.

Rogers has played repeatedly with their usage allowances, particularly for its Extreme tier, which has seen increases and decreases over the past few years:

Rogers Extreme Tier Usage Cap History

• 2009: 95GB per month
• 2010: Reduced to 80GB per month (-15GB)
• 2011: Increased to 100GB per month (+20GB)
• 2012: Increased to 120GB per month (+20GB)

Rogers’ Express service gets just a 10GB monthly bump, making the speed upgrade less valuable because customers are restrained from using the service.

Rogers says the incremental upgrades are a result of Canadians using the Internet more than ever.

“Rogers customers are increasingly watching movies on Rogers on Demand Online, working from home and using multiple devices like tablets and laptops connected by Wi-Fi to the internet,” said John Boynton, executive vice-president and chief marketing officer at Rogers Communications. “The ways Canadians are using the internet are changing dramatically and we are constantly reviewing our plans and policies to ensure they deliver the best possible customer experience that lines up with evolving needs and usage patterns.”

Apparently those living in western Canada use the Internet even more, because Shaw Communications’ comparable broadband tiers are much more generous:

Shaw Communications Usage Allowances

• High Speed 10Mbps: 125GB per month
• High Speed 20Mbps: 200GB per month
• Broadband 50Mbps: 400GB per month

Ex-CEO Jim Shaw earns even more not working for the cable company his father founded.

The ex-CEO of Shaw Communications is a charter member of the 1% Club, raking in more than $25 million from a golden parachute retirement package cable customers are paying as part of their ever-increasing monthly cable bills.

Jim Shaw earned $1.2 million in 2011 from his duties as chief executive.  But when the 53-year old decided early retirement was right for him, the company that shares his name provided a generous $25.5 million parting gift.  That’s a golden parachute package equivalent to what more than 2,000 lower-middle class Canadians earn each year.

What makes Jim Shaw worth that much?  Company officials claim the departing CEO helped the company earn new revenue.  But Shaw subscribers know the recipe for higher revenue is easy to make — annual rate increases and overpriced products and services.

Shaw didn’t have much of a fight justifying his departing pay package.  Not with his father J.R. Shaw holding 79 percent of the cable company’s Class A voting stock.  The Shaw family has been especially generous with themselves in 2011.  Brother Brad pocketed $15.8 million this year for himself.

The Shaw Executive Money Party has grown so large, the company’s top six paid officers collectively walked away with compensation of $82.2 million in 2011, $1.5 million more than Shaw Communications earned in the entire fourth quarter of 2010.  Imagine one-quarter of your company’s earnings headed straight into the pockets of a half-dozen employees, often immediate family members of the CEO or company founder.

Even those sums are dwarfed by the $330 million the company has now set aside to guarantee executive pensions, even as Shaw’s lower level employees (and most of their customers) see their incomes continue to stagnate, if not outright decline.

That three Shaw family members collectively grabbed $58.6 million from the company accounts is not welcome news for shareholders.  Jim Shaw’s exit package in particular proved galling for some, particularly because he effectively sabotaged his own standing with image-damaging public comments and an abrasive management style.

“There was a lot of institutional backlash over the pension given to Jim on his departure because it was rather monstrous,” one pension fund adviser was reported as saying in the Edmonton Journal. “This is just another piece that will get everybody upset.”

Shareholders are also unimpressed with the value of their Class B Shaw stock, which has remained lackluster since 2006.

While top management earned big, Shaw has alienated customers with legendary call holding times that can extend for hours, annual rate increases for cable service, and less-than-impressive customer satisfaction scores.

Shaw is western Canada’s dominant cable operator.

(Courtesy: Glasbergen)

Shaw Cable customers in Langley and Aldergrove, B.C., waited as long as four hours on hold to speak to a customer service representative trying to learn when their cable and broadband service would be restored after vandals cut a fiber line.

Days later, hundreds of customers were still without service… and answers.

“When I called [Shaw], I was told there was a four-hour wait to talk to customer service,” area resident Candace Hopkins told CBC News.

That four hour hold time was hardly an isolated case.  Several CBC viewers reported similar experiences, and many simply gave up calling even though their cable service was out for days.

Shaw Cable suspects the vandals were would-be copper thieves, unhappy to discover their efforts would only net them fiber optic cables which have almost no resale value.  But customers suspect the cable cuts have not been a priority for Shaw, leaving customers in the dark about when service would be restored.

CBC News called Shaw customer service and only managed to get a recording, which said nothing about how large the problem was or when it would be fixed, saying only that some service was restored and crews were working on the rest.

Other calls to Shaw’s media relations department from CBC News have not been returned.

Shaw customers are not amused, invading the company’s Twitter account with repeated complaints. Other outages have left customers with similar experiences.  One customer on the Outer Gulf Islands told he’d be waiting up to four hours for help managed to leave his number for a call back.

“The kicker is that after about four hours we received a call from something approximating Shaw,” the customer explains. “I believe that it was a call center in India. To add insult to injury, the voice on the other end of the phone line told me that everything was fine with my line. And, it was. Service had been restored 10 minutes before the call back. When I tried to explain this and asked what the earlier service disruption was about, the voice on the line simply kept repeating that everything was fine on my line.”

Shaw’s hold times are infamous in western Canada.  It is not uncommon to wait at least an hour to speak to a customer service representative as we reported back in September.  Some customers find it quicker to drive to the nearest cable office to arrange for service calls or manage their accounts.  So far, Canadian regulators have done little to pressure Shaw into making improvements.

When service was restored, some customers were brave enough to call Shaw to request outage credits.  “A big mistake,” shares one of our readers.

“The automated voice said there was a two hour hold time and when I finally got through, I was told I couldn’t get a credit because I didn’t report the outage during the outage,” says Stop the Cap! reader Jules who shared this story over his restored Internet service in Aldergrove.

“They didn’t seem to have a good answer when I suggested how difficult that would have been since it took out my Shaw telephone line as well. I got my credit.”

Fiber optic cable spool

For the most populated provinces in Canada, questions about when fiber-to-the-home service will become a reality are easy to answer:  Never, indefinitely.

Some of Canada’s largest telecommunications providers have their minds made up — fiber isn’t for consumers, it’s for their backbone and business networks.  For citizens of Toronto, Calgary, Montreal, and Vancouver coping with bandwidth shortages, providers have a much better answer: pay more, use less Internet.

Fiber broadband projects in Canada are hard to find, because providers refuse to invest in broadband upgrades to deliver the kinds of speeds and capacity Canadians increasingly demand.  Instead, companies like Bell, Shaw, and Rogers continue to hand out pithy upload speeds, throttled downloads, and often stingy usage caps.  Much of the country still relies on basic DSL service from Bell or Telus, and the most-promoted broadband expansion project in the country — Bell’s Fibe, is phoney baloney because it relies on existing copper telephone wires to deliver the last mile of service to customers.

Much like in the United States, the move to replace outdated copper phone lines and coaxial cable in favor of near-limitless capacity fiber remains stalled in most areas.  The reasons are simple: lack of competition to drive providers to invest in upgrades and the unwillingness to spend $1000 per home to install fiber when a 100GB usage cap and slower speeds will suffice.

The Toronto Globe & Mail reports that while 30-50 percent of homes in South Korea and Japan have fiber broadband, only 18 percent of Americans and less than 2 percent of Canadians have access to the networks that routinely deliver 100Mbps affordable broadband without rationed broadband usage plans.

In fact, the biggest fiber projects underway in Canada are being built in unexpected places that run contrary to the conventional wisdom that suggest fiber installs only make sense in large, population-dense, urban areas.

Manitoba’s MTS plans to spend $125-million over the next five years to launch its fiber to the home service, FiON.  By the end of 2015, MTS expects to deploy fiber to about 120,000 homes in close to 20 Manitoba communities.  In Saskatchewan, SaskTel is investing $199 million in its network in 2011 and approximately $670 million in a seven-year Next Generation Broadband Access Program (2011 – 2017). This program will deploy Fiber to the Premises (FTTP) and upgrade the broadband network in the nine largest urban centers in the province – Saskatoon, Regina, Moose Jaw, Weyburn, Estevan, Swift Current, Yorkton, North Battleford and Prince Albert.

“Saskatchewan continues to be a growing and dynamic place,” Minister responsible for SaskTel Bill Boyd said. “The deployment of FTTP will create the bandwidth capacity to allow SaskTel to deploy exciting new next generation technologies to better serve the people of Saskatchewan.”

But the largest fiber project of all will serve the unlikely provinces of Atlantic Canada, among the most economically challenged in the country.  Bell Aliant is targeting its FibreOP fiber to the home network to over 600,000 homes by the end of next year.  On that network, Bell Aliant plans to sell speeds up to 170/30Mbps to start.

In comparison, residents in larger provinces are making due with 3-10Mbps DSL service from Bell or Telus, or expensive usage-limited, speed-throttled cable broadband service from companies like Rogers, Shaw, and Videotron.

Bell Canada is trying to convince its customers it has the fiber optic network they want.  Its Fibe Internet service sure sounds like fiber, but the product fails truth-in-advertising because it isn’t an all-fiber-network at all. It’s similar to AT&T’s U-verse — relying on fiber to the neighborhood, using existing copper phone wires to finish the job.  Technically, that isn’t much different from today’s cable systems, which also use fiber to reach into individual neighborhoods.  Traditional coaxial cable handles the signal for the rest of the journey into subscriber homes.

A half-fiber network can do better than none at all.  In Ontario, Bell sells Fibe Internet packages at speeds up to 25Mbps, but even those speeds cannot compare to what true fiber networks can deliver.

Globe & Mail readers seemed to understand today’s broadband realities in the barely competitive broadband market. One reader’s take:

“The problem in Canada (and elsewhere) preventing wide scale deployment of FTTH isn’t the technology, nor the cost. It’s a lack of political vision and will, coupled with incumbent service providers doing whatever they can to hold on to a dysfunctional model that serves their interests at the expense of consumers.”

Another:

“The problem with incumbents is they only think in 2-3 year terms. If they can’t make their money back in that period of time, they’re not interested. Thinking 20, heck even 10 years ahead is not in their vocabulary.”

Julia Chastin is old enough to know that life sometimes makes you wait, but three hours is ridiculous.

Chastin (her maiden name, to protect her privacy), is a customer of Shaw Cable in Fort Macleod, Alb.  Her Internet service went down last weekend when the neighbor’s overzealous application of a “weed whacker” went awry and damaged her cable connection.  Chastin called Shaw Cable to report the problem, and there began her life in call queue hell.

“Usually companies who make you wait will tell you if their lines are especially busy, which is fine because I can just set the telephone on the speakerphone and go about my business until someone answers, but this turned a phone call into an afternoon adventure,” Chastin says.

In total, it was two hours, fifty-three minutes before a human being finally came on the phone, but only briefly.

“I heard this fumbling sound like someone’s headset was coming off, some mumbling and laughter, and then the line disconnected,” Chastin reports.  “I was furious.”

Chastin is not alone.

“Shaw’s hold times are legendary here in the west,” says Rob Kelvey, a Shaw customer near Vancouver.  “You can easily wait on hold an hour or two before someone answers, and that is day or night.”

Kelvey reports Shaw teases customers with an option inviting customers to accept a call back from a Shaw representative instead of waiting on hold, but it doesn’t work.

“I have used this option at least three times in the past year or so and it has never worked once.”

The problem isn’t just noticed by customers.  A recent polite editorial in the Grand Forks (B.C.) Gazette called out Shaw’s ridiculous hold times and poor customer service:

There are probably many people out there who have had to call the cable company when a TV or Internet-related problem arises only to be put on hold and not just recently.

It is not unusual to be put in a phone queue, especially when it comes to customer service, but the sometimes extraordinarily long wait times can even test those with the greatest of patience.

“Three hours isn’t patience, it’s perseverance,” retorts Chastin.

Customer Service Scoreboard bottom-rated Shaw, based on several hundred responses from customers.  More than 300 were critical of Shaw; only 17 people shared positive experiences with the company’s representatives.   The website rated Shaw Cable a dismal 29 out of 200, putting them firmly in the “terrible” category.

“Sometimes it really is faster to walk to a local Shaw Cable office to report problems instead of calling them on the phone, an ironic fact for a telecommunications company,” says Kelvey.

Shaw officials will occasionally tweet apologies for extended hold times and suggest customers use their online chat customer support feature or their Facebook page for assistance.  But some customers found Shaw’s online chat had “hold times” as well, sometimes as long as 40 minutes.

“Fort Macleod doesn’t offer a lot of options for Internet access, so waiting for Shaw is unfortunately the best option, but when I finally did manage to get someone on the phone, they heard from me good and I received a $20 service credit as an olive branch, which I appreciated,” Chastin says.

“I’d appreciate more not having to wait my life away on hold for hours even more.”