Rogers Cable CEO John Tory said Wednesday about half of the spending has been accelerated to fix problems. It's necessary for us to make some expenditures. At the end of the last quarter, Rogers had 346,800 high-speed Internet customers. Everyone wants high-speed now. It's essential for a lot of the applications that people want to run on the Internet.
Cable needs to get people signed up now before it's too late.
The number of outages have been dramatically reduced. On Thursday, Excite is opening a new Canadian headquarters and data centre that will help it deliver its service. Dermot O'Carroll, Rogers Cable's senior vice-president of network engineering and operations, said that by the end of July the company will have a second connection to Excite in the United States and, by the end of the year, it will have a third through Windsor, Ont. Part of the investment includes better in-house traffic monitoring that will let Rogers ensure it has adequate Internet capacity in specific areas. Rogers has also boosted the number of customer service staff and will send out a troubleshooting CD-ROM to customers to help them handle some personal computer problems on their own.