All About Hardware Upgrades

Rogers doesn't hate you - they just don't know how to effectively express their love
The hardware upgrade is one of the most commonly misunderstood and most difficult to explain systems in the Rogers arsenal of customer frustration. When can you get a new phone? Do you have to sign a contract? Have you earned a new phone just by virtue of the fact that you've been with Rogers for so long? Can you get a free phone? These are questions to which, depending upon whom you ask, you will receive answers of varying degrees of confusion. Hopefully though, with a little help from the Rogers Guru, some light can be shed on the situation.

Please note that this guide applies to consumer hardware upgrades and not corporate hardware upgrades. If you have a corporate plan, your hardware upgrades play by the rules that your company has agreed upon when they negotiated the corporate deal.

It's all about the 3 year contract
The first thing you need to know about a getting a phone from Rogers, is that the price you see on the sticker in the store next to the phone you want only applies to a very select group of people: potential customers getting ready to sign their first three year contract. If you look in the corner of the price tag, in tiny print, you'll see the actual cost of the phone, which is usually anywhere from about $180 for a cheap phone all the way up to about $700 dollars. Anyone is free to just buy one of these phones outright whenever they want for that price in order to avoid signing a new three year deal. You, however, have been a loyal customer and are tired of walking around with a phone that has the back cover scotch taped on so the battery doesn't fall out, but you don't want to take out a mortgage for your new phone. Can't you just sign a new contract and get the phone for the price you see? The answer isn't simple as your intuition is telling you it should be.

The inner workings of the hardware upgrade

So we know that Rogers will give someone a deal on a phone in order to win their business for the next three years, but the problem for you is that they already have you. A good way to think about it is to flip it around and say that you made them a deal when you signed the contract - you would sign on for three years as long as they give you a deal on a phone. Now you want a new phone, but you don't have nearly as much to offer in exchange for a cheaper phone as you did before you signed that contract. That being said, Rogers will still give you a deal on the phone, but there are some ground rules:

Rule number 1: it has to have been at least one year since you last got a phone at a discount from Rogers

This discount might have been the $29 you paid for your phone when you signed up, or it might have been a previous hardware upgrade. Either way, whether you realize it or not, Rogers did give you a deep discount on the phone that you bought. From a business perspective, the discount was an investment to get you to stay a customer for the next three years. It wouldn't make any sense to keep giving people that discount over and over again without gaining a lot more time on that contract. They'll only start to offer discounts again after one year. Note that this is completely independent of other contract renewals that you might have performed since then - some price plans require a contract renewal. Renewing your contract to get them does not affect your hardware upgrade eligibility.

Rule number 2: the discount you are eligible to receive is dependent on how much money you have spent since last time you received a discount

Rogers does actually reward people for their loyalty, contrary to the way some of its reps may make you feel. The reward gets bigger the more money you spend on your phone bills. There are five levels of pricing for hardware upgrades, referred to by dealers as "tiers". This is how it breaks down:

Tier Level	Account Revenue	Formula to calculate price
1	$0-$1000	x+$100+$35 admin fee
2	$1001-$1200	x+$75+$35 admin fee
3	$1201-$1500	x+$35 admin fee
4	$1501-$2500	x
5	$2500+	x-$25

So what's x? X the suggested retail price of the phone, and is usually that price that you see on the sticker next to a new phone, or at least very close to it (sometimes there are still special deals for new customers - x is almost never ever zero).

Edit (thanks to D-MAC) - if it has been 30 months or more since your activation or last hardware upgrade, you automatically qualify for tier 3 pricing, even if you're not there yet revenue-wise.

Rule number three: There are other rules.

This rule is kind of a cop-out on my part to keep it down to three rules, but the fact is that many other rules apply. Generally you have to play by the same rules as a new customer, meaning if you want a BlackBerry you're going to have to get a data plan; if you want an iPhone, you're going to have to have a voice plan of 35$ or higher or the phone will be $50 more; if you want a vision phone you need a vision plan. Sometimes there are even deals exclusive to existing customers that new customers don't get. There are several phone specific scenarios like these, which the rep at a store will be able to explain to you. Hopefully you will understand these a lot better knowing what you know now about hardware upgrades.

A quick note about couples and family plans

On a family plan, the revenue accumulates from all lines. As such, you will go up tiers twice as fast. Unfortunately though, when one line does a hardware upgrade, the other line is reset back to tier 1. Each line still has to wait one year since the last time it did a hardware upgrade.

TRG