Bad Rogers customer Service

Last year on Apr/2005 I had a call from Rogers customer support person, he said if I agree to keep my existing internet and Cable TV for a year then I will save 15% of the price but if I terminate Rogers service before one year term finishes then I should pay back the 15% money which I have saved, up to date. I said ‘yes’ I will take the offer. He has not mentioned anything else during this verbal agreement.

On Jan 2006 I have received a price hike notice from Rogers that indicating my Basic Cable TV and Ultra-Lite speed internet rate will be increased by $10 + tax because of their operational cost increase. Then from the $10 I will get 15% discount so the increase will be $8.50 + tax.

So I called the Rogers customer support to ask to terminate the service right after my one year term finished, by Apr/1/2006.

(Note: Two month ago they have stopped the Newsgroup service which I regularly use but NOT reduced the price by a penny)

The customer support person told me if I terminate the service before first year I have to pay $100 and after first year (during the 2nd year) I have to pay $50 as fine and I have to place the termination order before 30 days as well. She also said the terms are printed on the back of the monthly bill and I, the customer, agreed on the term once I paid their bill.

On the back of the Rogers bill the terms and conditions No.9 begin as follow
***** “We may at any time and from time to time change these conditions and/or (unless otherwise expressly agreed with you) any fee, features or other aspects of your service upon notice to you WITHOUT YOUR CONSENT….” ******

Gimmicks on these terms are nonsense. None of the Rogers customer will ever read these fonts size 1.5, fine printed terms before paying each bill.

I fought back with the Rogers customer service but they said their customer service representative who sold the bundle deal to me wrote a note saying I am agreeing first year contract with a fine of $100 and the 2nd year contract with the fine of $50, and if I want to terminate then I have to pay this fine or I have to put up with their rate hike.

Anyone had past experience or solution or suggestion to this?

I never heard of Rogers cable TV. If you have a choice of TV/INTERNET providers then you are lucky. Most areas have only one choice and thus have to put up with high prices and bad service.

I have Adelphia and my INTERNET went out tonight. I called tech support and got the connection going again. He changed my ip address to get service going again. I asked him why the old address wouldn't work and he said they may have done some modification to the system that caused it to stop working. What could I do, nothing. Of course they should have prevented interruption of my service instead of not even notifying me, but there is nothing you can do except complain.