Rogers isn’t telling the whole truth…

You may have seen the comercials, or perhsp heard the radio spots on any Rogers’ owned station. “Buy our Home Phone Classic Value Plan. And save $25 over Bell’s comparable plan.” I call shenanigans on that right there.

First of all, much like a pop band who’s third album is called ‘Classic Hits’, can you really call a package ‘Classic Value’ when you’ve been selling home phone service for less than three years?

But let’s ignore that for now. Let’s debunk the claims…

Rogers says you save $25/mn based on a comparable plan. The key word here is comparable.Rogers is able to compare it’s plans (and it does have one that is even cheaper: $21.95 w/ 250 LD mins) against Bell’s plans + long distance because all of the Rogers plans come with some minutes.

You can save $25 a month because the Home Phone Challenge¹ automatically adds Bell’s $19.95 Unlimited Long Distance Minutes package. (This is hilarious because they offer the exact same package but don’t select it by default when you take the challenge.)

If you deselect any of the features (voicemail, call waiting, etc) you will compare the Basic Value package against Bell. But even then, you are forced to select at least one long distance package from Bell for comparison purposes. I understand the ‘white’ side of this lie. You want to compare apple to apples. Rogers’ plans all come with long distance whether you want it or not.

You only save money over Bell because they are forcing you to take long distance minutes even if you don’t use them.

I hate these kind of mistruths in advertising. If I was an uninformed consumer and walked into a Rogers store and wanted to save my $25/mn and switched, the odds are I wouldn’t be saving much more than five bucks. If I didn’t care about long distance, the most I’d save is a dollar.

But in reality it is worse than that:

So there you have it. You may not get long distance, but you pay less with Bell.