When the major U.S. carriers announced in 2022 that they would shut down their 3G networks, the fallout reached far beyond American subscribers. At Rogers Communications, it triggered a crisis inside a legacy wireless brand called Cityfone — a carrier serving a base of predominantly senior customers, many of them affiliated with organizations like Zoomer Wireless, the Royal Canadian Legion, the Ontario Municipal Retired Employees Association, and the Canadian Snowbird Association. Cityfone ran on 3G. Once the U.S. shutdown took effect, any Cityfone customer who crossed the border lost service instantly — and for a subscriber base built around snowbirds and frequent travelers, that was not a minor inconvenience. Monthly churn on the base jumped from roughly 0.68% to nearly 4% almost overnight.
Solving that problem fell to Rhys Hanson, a Business Development Manager who manages the Rogers Preferred Program (RPP) — a partnership model through which Rogers offers exclusive wireless discounts to the employees and members of partner organizations, delivered through a network of third-party dealers who handle direct customer engagement and sales. In late 2023, Hanson was assigned to lead Cityfone’s wind-down: migrating tens of thousands of customers off a soon-to-be-defunct 3G network and onto Rogers’ 5G network, under a strict legal requirement that every migration be entirely voluntary. His work on the project ultimately earned him two Ted Rogers Awards, the company’s highest internal recognition for business transformation.
The voluntary-only constraint was what made the project genuinely difficult. Rogers could not force-migrate a single customer off Cityfone; each one had to choose to move. That meant persuading a base of customers 65 and older — many of whom had stayed loyal to the same brand and the same dealer relationship for years — to voluntarily switch providers and switch networks, with no fallback option if they simply refused. The population Hanson was working with was, by nature, high-touch, price-sensitive, and largely uncomfortable with technology, which meant the entire program had to be engineered around removing friction and building trust rather than applying pressure.
Hanson’s role touched nearly every function of the business. On the commercial side, he renegotiated the contracts the senior associations held directly with Cityfone and restructured them so the relationship moved to Red Wireless, the third-party dealer he manages that would take over servicing the base going forward. On pricing, he worked with Rogers’ finance and pricing teams to build a plan on the Rogers network comparable to what customers were already paying on Cityfone — a necessary step, since a voluntary migration had little chance of succeeding if the new plan felt like a price increase. On the operational side, he secured internal approval to transfer customer personal information to the dealer taking over the base, navigating Rogers’ data governance and security review process. And on communications, he worked closely with the marketing team to build the billing messages, flyers, and newsletters that would reach these customers and explain, in plain terms, why they needed to act and what they were moving to.
The senior associations tied to Cityfone were not typical telecom stakeholders, and managing those relationships required a different kind of diplomacy. Organizations like Zoomer, the Legion, MROO, and the Snowbird Association had spent years building trust with their members around the Cityfone brand specifically — which meant Hanson was, in effect, asking each of them to help unwind something they had vouched for. He went back to each association individually to renegotiate the foundation of the relationship, moving them from a direct arrangement with Cityfone to one serviced through Red Wireless under the Rogers Preferred Program, and had to demonstrate to each that their members would be taken care of, that pricing would remain fair, and that the support model wouldn’t disappear. Once satisfied, those associations became essential partners in reaching their own membership — a critical piece, given how central trust is to that demographic.
As customers began migrating, Hanson set up dedicated escalation processes between Rogers’ Care team and Red Wireless specifically for this base, recognizing that a standard support path wouldn’t hold up for customers who needed more hand-holding through billing questions, device setup, or plan comparisons. Acting as the program’s internal subject matter expert, he guided pricing decisions, approved process changes, and resolved issues as the migration scaled — all on top of his existing account responsibilities, since the project fell well outside his normal day-to-day scope.
The migration ultimately moved 55,000 customers from Cityfone to Rogers. What separated the program from one that could easily have stalled, Hanson says, was refusing to treat pricing, trust, and communication as separate problems. A technically sound migration path could still have failed if the pricing looked like an increase, if the associations customers trusted weren’t fully on board, or if the messaging didn’t land with a demographic unmoved by a generic marketing email. Getting all three right at once, under a strict voluntary-only mandate, is what turned a serious churn crisis into one of the more significant business transformation efforts recognized internally at Rogers — and the reason Hanson’s work on it earned the company’s top honor twice over.
Rhys Hanson is a Business Development Manager at Rogers Communications in Toronto, where he manages merchant and organizational partnerships under the Rogers Preferred Program.
