Posted on 2009-07-13

Rogers Communications Inc. (TSX: RCI.A, TSX: RCI.B, NYSE: RCI) the largest communications company in Canada, has had an entirely inaccessible website for most of the day today. It seems to be a failure of some kind in their Java Server, which is normally masked by a friendly error message, but even that only seems to be working about 10 percent of the time

While trying to research my options for mobile internet access, as always I comparison shopped. I was actually leaning towards rogers because of their GSM rather than CDMA network, however I found the website to be entirely inaccessible. Every page is just a slightly different java error, except for the few that failed gracefully, and returned the user friendly error message. Luckily, I am not currently a rogers subscriber, so I haven't lost the ability to access my account, view/pay my bills, or otherwise interact with rogers. This issue has continued all afternoon, so I've had to put off considering my options for mobile internet.

Note: A friend of mine is looking to do streaming video on the road throughout the united states, however it seems that AT&T, Verizon and Sprint only offer 5GB for $59.99/month packages, and the overage rates are $0.05/mb except for AT&T which is $0.00048/kb ($0.50/mb, ten times more). Please leave a comment if you know of a service that would allow my friend to stream something closer to 20GB/month while on the road.

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Friendly Competition

By: Allan Jude