“Did your Rogers iPhone on the Rogers network work at the Rogers Centre tonight? Mine didn’t.”
By Linda Forrest
I dipped back into my former life for a night last week when I went to Toronto to see U2 at the Rogers Centre. It was incredible.
We were lucky enough to have general admission tickets that enabled us to get as close as we wanted to to the stage, which was close. In order to do so, though, we waited in line outside of the venue for most of the day. Thank heaven for the PDA or it would have been considerably more challenging to fill the time. Liveblogging the lineup would have been far too boring for anyone not there (it was pretty boring in the lineup itself) but it was great to be able to check emails, Tweet when the mood struck, and catch up on online news.
When my phone worked, that is.
Having a Rogers iPhone on the Rogers network outside (and later inside) the Rogers Centre, one would think that reception would be stellar, that the data network would be lightning fast. One would be wrong.
The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if the fact that Blackberry was sponsoring the U2 tour impacted the service. Anecdotally, those attending the show who were using Blackberries didn’t seem to have the same frustrating lack of network access that we on the Rogers network did. Good to know that Elvis Costello could check his emails on his Blackberry with impunity while the rest of us with a Rogers account had to be contented with just basking in the glow of the many Rogers’ logos that surrounded us, rather than a functional network.
More than once in surveying round-ups and reviews of the show, I came across sentiments similar to “Did your Rogers iPhone on the Rogers network work at the Rogers Centre tonight? Mine didn’t.” The company, which struggles with its reputation as a reliable service provider, something we’ve addressed at other times on this blog, missed a golden opportunity to knock it out of the park, a park that was filled with 58,000 U2 fans, two nights in a row, that in today’s era of social media and pervasive user-created content would be sharing their experience at the show, something that extends beyond just the performance of the band itself.
Image: Open Clip Art Library.
