While Rogers gets absolutely inundated with complaints on Friday amid an enourmous wireless and internet blackout, other Canadian providers are reaping the benefits.

Staff at the Eaton Centre locations of Freedom Mobile, Virgin, Lucky Mobile and of course, top competitor Bell, are all reporting "way more" users signing up for phone plans today, most of them existing Rogers customers fed up with their service (or, rather, lack of service).

Both the Eaton Centre's Bell stores were reporting an uptick in sales on Friday.

Management at the Bell store on the centre's lower level even stated that no one working has been able to take a lunch break as of 2:30 p.m. because of how swamped they have been with new clients.

Meanwhile, the table at the nearby Freedom kiosk was littered with new contracts (despite the fact that the company is dealing with its own outage in Southern Ontario), with employees on-site saying that all of them were people converting from Rogers. 

How easy and fast can I port my number over from @chatrmobile

— Jose Pedant (@HaterofNetflix) July 8, 2022

Customer service representatives at the Telus store, who also noted more sign-ups today and higher foot traffic in the shopping centre generally as people take advantage of its free wifi, even went so far as posting signage to troll the fellow telecom giant's outage while also soliciting new business because of it.

"Phone not working? :(" a whiteboard at the front entrance the storefront reads before listing SIM only and pay-as-you-go options for people weary of Rogers and in need of an immediate alternative.

The network outage affecting Rogers customers is not impacting TELUS Internet, home phone or wireless infrastructure. Some customers may experience issues when calling or texting Rogers customers. Calls and texts between TELUS customers and other providers are working normally.

— TELUS Support (@TELUSsupport) July 8, 2022

The pricing shown is, notably, for new activations only, directed specifically at those dealing with the frustrating blackout that has persisted since around 5 a.m., impacting tens of thousands of residents across the GTA, Montreal, Winnipeg, the east coast and other parts of the country.

Freedom, Lucky, Virgin and other kiosks were bustling with customers looking to change providers from Rogers on Friday.

All of the above providers' outlets were visibly quite busy come afternoon, with virtually every available staff member occupied helping people.

Some Bell customers may be experiencing issues when trying to call or text Rogers subscribers due to current interruptions in Rogers network services. The Bell network is operational and calls and texts between Bell customers or to other providers are not impacted.

— Bell Support (@Bell_Support) July 8, 2022

Companies like Bell have also taken to social media to remind the public that while Rogers remains down, their networks are operating just fine. While brands like Fido and Chatr run on Rogers networks, Virgin, Koodo, Telus, Public Mobile and Lucky Mobile all run on Bell, and are thus functional today.

sitting here in this rogers outage with my cogeco internet and virgin mobile phone mad as hell that i can still log on for work today pic.twitter.com/kLOZ74eI0U

— ☁️ minimum hag ⁷ (@pickIeginger) July 8, 2022

Those who are with one of these alternative providers have been taking to social media to either laugh at the rest of our misfortune, or bemoan the fact that they didn't have the excuse of shoddy internet to take the day off work.