Like thousands of others, I headed downtown yesterday, weathering the scorching heat, to support the annual Gay Pride Parade in Toronto. A good time was had by all and the support was clearly evident. What was also evident was Rogers’ lack of service availability in the downtown core throughout most of the afternoon.

I’ll admit, at first I wanted to give Rogers the benefit of the doubt for the lack of service: could it be water damage? I was drenched! Then I looked at my phone and it was in fine working condition. So I turned to my sister’s Blackberry 9700. Nope, SOS as well. I was now perplexed and frustrated. I then (in my true over the top “CellGuru” fashion) began to walk up to people, asking bluntly “Who is your carrier” and “Is your phone working?” It turns out that most consumers with Rogers phones were experiencing an outage, while those on Telus and Bell HSPA were rocking 5 bars, mocking us. I now went from anger to all out jealousy. I was frantic! No tweeting? No BBM? No foursquare? How could I let my many followers know my every exact move?

I am generally known to walk around with 2 lines, one Telus (Motorola Milestone) and one Rogers (Blackberry 9700). Keeping me always connected, but on this day I didn’t have my Android powered Telus device, so I was left with nothing and felt completely naked. Plans ended up falling through and I went home sad and disgruntled. Yes, ALL over lack of network coverage.

But why did this happen? I had just come back from Halifax (where, I may add, the data speeds were blazing fast) happy again with Rogers and their Canadian network coverage which allowed me to keep my loved ones and followers in the loop of events as they happened. Yes, I’m aware the population of Halifax isn’t even close to that of Toronto, but that isn’t my point. Rogers claims the clearest reception and fewest dropped calls but how can I drop a call if my phone isn’t working?

Though Rogers is tested and true, it is fairly well known fact that Bell/Telus’ new HSPA network is faster, simply because it’s less congested than Rogers’. But, this generally relates to the country side, not the Toronto corridor. It wasn’t until a few hours later, and when I was out of the downtown core, that I got ANY network connectivity. Does this mean Rogers is so congested that it’s crashing on itself? Or Bell/Telus is simply stronger when put to the test. Probably the former, but it’s still no excuse. This isn’t AT&T!

I tried calling Rogers and received the generic, “we were aware of an issue and are working on it.” While Canadians take for granted that its biggest network, Rogers, is usually much more reliable than AT&T’s equivalent GSM network, especially in main urban centres. I rarely experience outages on Rogers, and it is even rarer that even EDGE is unavailable; it is usually the loss of 3G temporarily, and EDGE, while slower, is a much more stable, and allows for phone calls to be made.

Yesterday’s experience was the first time in recent memory that Rogers’ network merely failed. Yes, there were thousands of people using its network. But provisions need to be made. Rogers needs to prepare in advance, and put up temporary towers when they know there will be higher demand on their network. I’d love Rogers to comment on this. We will wait and see their response, if any.

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