Rogers provides my home Internet service and I pay them good money to do so. Recently, Rogers announced they've teamed up with Yahoo! so there are several new benefits available to me at no extra charge. I took a long look at this "enhanced" Rogers Yahoo! Hi-Speed Internet service yesterday and I'm feeling more than a little cheated by the good folks at Rogers. Allow me to explain...
Rogers is celebrating the fact I can now "enjoy enhanced e-mail services with more storage, spam filtering technology, anti-virus technology and improved e-mail Web access". They're right, it's called Yahoo! Mail and I've been using the service for several years. It's available to any Tom, Dick or Harry at no charge. Rogers is merely allowing their customers to merge one Rogers email account with an existing Yahoo! account or simply use Yahoo! Mail with ones Rogers.com email address as the username. I'm certainly glad we weren't charged for a free product. Also of note, the ads that appear within Yahoo! Mail are not suppressed, even though you're paying a great deal each month for the service. You're treated exactly like the thousands of Yahoo! users who didn't pay a cent.
Rogers is also celebrating the fact you can "share and store digital photos online with friends and family". This is another current Yahoo! service that is free to Yahoo! users. Then there's all the marketing crap from Rogers about the Yahoo! content. In other words, you're now a Yahoo! User so you can do what every other Yahoo! User can do: use the Yahoo! Instant Messenger, use the Yahoo! Companion, program your very own Internet radio station with LAUNCHcast, play online games with thousands of other Internet players, watch thousands of music videos and access the latest news and weather via your Rogers Yahoo! Hi-Speed Internet portal.
None of the aforementioned facts actually bother me personally, because I've never used my Rogers email. I've been a loyal Yahoo! user from the beginning, and I'm actually glad to see my ISP and Yahoo! integrate like this. What bothers me though is what they're doing with the Rogers webspace you get as a Rogers Internet customer. At the end of this calendar year, Rogers is eliminating the 10 MB of webspace you get with each email account you create with them. Instead, they're telling you to start using Yahoo! Geocities instead. Yahoo! Geocities will force advertisements on your pages. They do this because their service is free. That's right, it's a free service to all and not exclusive to Rogers customers. Whereas Rogers webspace was ad-free, Geocities currently isn't. This affects me personally and it's not fair. If Rogers Yahoo! Users are going to be treated exactly like regular Yahoo! Users, where exactly is the benefit? Where is the enhancement? Isn't the opposite, in fact, more accurate?
At the end of the day the most important service I get from my ISP is Internet connectivity. This new service also offers 5.0 Mbps download and 800 Kbps upload speeds. That's really, really fast and I'd love to have this access at "no extra charge" and Rogers says that's the case. Oh wait, I just read the fine print. A DOCSIS modem is required and that's $99.95 plus applicable taxes. It's nothing as it seems...
