Is The Rogers Quick Start Guide Being Yanked? [UPDATED]

I’ve got two reports that the Rogers Quick Start Guide that has received almost universal scorn from Rogers customers (along with a not too positive review from yours truly) may be on the way out the door. Here are the reports that I received:

“They got rid of it in my area, Bowmanville, which is right outside Oshawa, which is an hour from Toronto.”

“Well, it is gone for me. Here is a video I made as fast as I could. No editing, just filmed and straight upload to YouTube:”

I am in the midst of getting a comment from Rogers on this to see if it’s true or not. But in the meantime if you’ve seen your Quick Start Guide yanked from your Rogers terminal, please leave me a comment and let me know.

UPDATE: Rogers left a comment. It appears to be some sort of bug.

Bell Canada Rolls Out “Fibe”….. Which Is A Total Shell Game With Consumers Getting The Shaft [UPDATED]

I noticed something new on Bell Canada’s website today. They have something called “Fibe”. Now this makes you think that it’s like Verizon FiOS where they are running fiber to the home. It’s not. It’s fiber to the node, meaning the fiber is terminated in a street cabinet up to several kilometers away from the your home, with the final connection being copper. Which means that this is really VDSL 2+. But it’s actually worse than that. The speeds are 6/1Mbps, 12/1Mbps, 18/1 Mbps and 25/7 Mbps depending on where you live. But the caps are abysmal at 25, 50, 75 and 75 GB for each tier.

Here’s the bottom line. It’s a game of semantics. They want to get the brownie points of having fiber without actually having fiber to the home. They’re at best trying to muddy the waters so that customers will get their Internet services from them. As a result consumers end up losing. What I hope happens is that cable companies show consumers how disingenuous this is and put Bell Canada in it’s place.

Rogers, are you paying attention?

UPDATE: Someone from Bell is paying attention. Besides logging a bunch of BCE IP addresses (nothing new there, Bell has been looking at this blog but not saying anything for as long as this blog has been around) that looked at this story, someone from Bell actually phoned my office number and didn’t leave a message. But since I have call display, I was able to trace the number back to a Bell office. Google suggests that it’s the one at the DVP and Wynford Drive in Toronto. Hmmm…. Perhaps I hit too close to home with this post? Oh yeah, calling the number back was a useless exercise as there was no voice mail (or more likely it is a line assigned to a PBX). Perhaps whomever was calling would drop me an e-mail and tell me why they’re calling me (though I won’t be surprised if they don’t).

Windows 7 RC To Start Shutting Down Real Soon Now

For those of you who are too cheap to buy a copy still running of the release candidate Windows 7, the end is near. Don’t believe me? You might want to pay a visit to the Windows Team Blog:

“For the RC, bi-hourly shutdowns will begin on March 1st, 2010. You will be alerted to install a released version of Windows and your PC will shut down automatically every 2 hours. On June 1st, 2010 if you are still on the Windows 7 RC your license for the Windows 7 RC will expire and the non-genuine experience is triggered where your wallpaper is removed and ‘This copy of Windows is not genuine’ will be displayed in the lower right corner above the taskbar.”

That would be one month from now. So it’s time to pay up for your copy of Windows 7. After all, you wouldn’t want to starve Microsoft of its well deserved cash now would you?