Rogers customers may want to think twice when dialling in Detroit

Rogers says new upgrades will ensure Windsor-area customers will have better cellphone service and are unlikely to have issues with phone signals bouncing off cell towers in the nearby U.S.

The flip side to these changes, however, is that it appears these customers won't be able to avoid paying roaming charges while they are in Detroit and very close to the border to the same degree they may have in the past.

The company told CBC News that it had used a workaround for many years for customers in border communities, including those in Windsor, so that they wouldn't get hit with roaming fees for calls they made when near the Canadian side of the border.

This is why Rogers, for years, did not charge these border-city customers roaming fees for voice calls of this type.

In some cases, this would include calls made from a zone that was defined from a point in Canada and went "fairly deep into Michigan," according to a Rogers spokesperson. Now that will extend to a radius of only about 10 kilometres.

With the changes made to the system, Rogers said its customers should no longer have an issue with getting problematic roaming fees and thus the company is no longer applying the prior workaround to accounts.