Canadians are gluttons for punishment. Why else would so many of us choose to live in places where it hurts to step outside more than half the year? Root for sports teams that notoriously suck? Pay the highest wireless internet rates in the developed world, like chumps?

Most of us don't really have a choice when it comes to the latter query, thanks to our government's distinct lack of regulatory action against a telecom oligopoly that includes only three players (the big three, as they're known) and the near-prohibition of legitimate competitors from entering local markets.

What we do have as individual internet and cellphone users in Canada is the choice between which of three huge providers we'll give our money to: Rogers, Telus or Bell.

Rogers caught the ire of people all over the country in July when home phone, internet and mobile service cacked out for some 13 million of their customers, leaving businesses and consumers across Canada in the lurch for days.

Rogers is spending $20 billion on upgrades but people are still furioushttps://t.co/oFyEXmGmkt #Toronto #Rogers

— blogTO (@blogTO) August 24, 2022

At the time, thousands of Rogers customers vowed publicly to switch their service to another provider... but new figures posted by the telecom this suggest that this didn't happen at all.

That, or so many additional people joined Rogers after the outage-induced mass exodus that it resulted in a net gain of some 221,000 mobile customers.

New wireless additions this year to date were still up 137 per cent as of Q3-2022, with about 448,000 new cellphone customers in total.

"Canada's Rogers Communications Inc on Wednesday beat quarterly revenue estimates as the wireless carrier benefited from higher roaming charges and demand for pricier plans, while its media business got a boost from a rebound in live sporting events," reported Reuters on Wednesday.

"The company added 164,000 monthly bill paying wireless phone subscribers in the third quarter despite decades-high inflation in Canada, indicating robust demand for its 5G services. In the last quarter, it added 122,000 users."

The telecom's latest financial report shows that, despite an uptick in some types of customers (including home internet and even cable television,) it had about 4,000 fewer security customers and 18,000 fewer landline accounts than it did during the same quarter of last year.

"Despite a crippling days-long outage to its network, Rogers actually managed to add 221,000 new cellphone customers since then."

In government and business, Canadians are happy to support mediocrity. #cdnpolihttps://t.co/XrYJftlShc

— Redeunt Saturnia Regna (@ImpCaesdfAug) November 9, 2022

The newly-released report also shows that Rogers took a loss of about $150 million in customer credits on account of the July outage.

Overall, the company posted a third-quarter profit of $371 million, down from $490 million during the same quarter last year.

"On July 8, 2022, a network outage occurred across both wireless and wireline services following a maintenance update in our core network that caused some of our routers to malfunction," reads the earnings report released on Wednesday.

"As a result of the outage, and our promise to customers that we would proactively provide five days of credits on their services, we have refunded approximately $150 million (July network outage-related credits), which is reflected in our Wireless and Cable financial results this quarter as a reduction of revenue."