I take daily walks in a park inside Vancouver where the Wind coverage is mediocre. I accept that coverage isn't going to be great with them; it's okay for the great deal I get with them (unlimited talk across North America, unlimited global SMS, unlimited MMS, call control (voice mail, call display, conference calls, etc.), unlimited internet (throttled after 5 GB per month), and tethering -- all for $40 CDN per month.
Having dealt with Rogers, Telus, and Bell, it's been a pleasure to deal with Wind.
However, this issue has really been bugging me, and it's not so much due to the weak coverage in a large park on a south (away from the city) facing slope, it's due to the customer support.
What I wanted to do, having had to call in twice to explain the issue, was talk to the tech guys about updating my Preferred Roaming List. I believe Vancouver is "location" 50 - part of the cell tower ID. When in a Wind Home zone (like location 50), one cannot force one's phone to connect to a Wind Away (Rogers) tower.
This policy is completely understandable. For users that auto-select their network provider so that when outside of a Wind Home zone they can still connect to Wind Away (roaming on Rogers), well they would certainly not want to answer a call, talk, then when the bill comes in find out that they were auto-connected to a Wind Away tower in a Wind Home zone (say, due to stronger signal from Wind Away tower near by).
I believe this policy is set via a "Preferred Roaming List" that says, basically, "when in a Wind Away zone, you can connect to Rogers; when in USA, you can connect to T-Mobile, etc." These policies are updated from the network provider to their customers' phones via SMS messages that are captured by the SIM card and never appear in the users' Messages. There are 4 layers / levels of SMS and only one of those is for the users to communicate.
I had hoped to speak to someone to see if I could have my Preferred Roaming List updated. I was doubtful they'd do it for me, but I wanted to ask. It would provide confirmation (or not) that my theory of how Preferred Roaming Lists work.
However, I got "roaming outside Wind Home should work - try it and call us back if not" - despite having tried it during the phone call to tech support (made from a different phone).
Then I got, "Well, there's network issue right now." "Please escalate - this has been ongoing and I tried to address it last week."
Tech support did call back - at 09:00 on a Sunday morning, which I missed. Then I got an SMS saying ticket was closed.
Called them again, got "your SIM is defective - free replacement at service centre." "My SIM (recently replaced), the SIM in a Nexus 5 also only a few months old), and the SIM in a Samsung Galaxy Nexus - all bad?!?"
"Oh, it's because Wind Away towers use a different frequency - only some phones support that." Total bullshit answer, obviously Rogers doesn't have separate frequencies between Wind Home and Wind Away zones ... for Wind's benefit.
So right now I'm quite pissed off at Wind. Not for the coverage hole (which I was told would be fixed with a new tower years ago, then that the new tower would be next year...), nor with them being unable to update my Preferred Roaming List, but with the uninformed, illogical, and frankly bullshit answers I kept getting.
It's been over 3 years and I'd hoped that the holes would've been fixed - but I really hoped they'd remain as responsive as when a network engineer sent out a rigger to adjust my local tower when we began having serious issues a few months into our having switched to them.