Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Back to dial-up then, eh?

The neighbourhood I live in doesn't have any Cable TV lines in the immediate area. There is no Cable TV (and thus no Cable Internet) option available here. Of course we've checked and double-checked and triple-checked.

The neighbourhood I live in is 22,500 feet from the nearest telephone 'central office'. They only offer DSL service out as far as 20,000 feet. They are not willing to give it a try. Of course we've checked and double-checked and triple-checked.

Satellite Internet is a 7th rate solution. $1000 for the kit. $200 per month for 2Mbps. Long latency times as each mouse click travels 40,000km up, 40,000km down and each webpage travels 40,000km up and 40,000km down. Plus they fiddle with the information to compress the webpages. Yuck.


So in November 2007 we got High Speed Internet service through Telus's EV-DO service paying just over $93 per month (expensive!!) for their relatively slow 2Mbps service. We chose their almost Top of Line data plan offering "Unlmited bandwidth" (the only higher plan was for people roaming into the USA).

Based on the assurance of continued service from Telus, we bought more PC hardware. When we were using dial-up, we just had one clunky old PC from early 2001. But once we got high speed from Telus, we bought a bespoke EV-DO WiFi router, a nice laptop, a new desktop, 802.11 hardware for the systems, and much more.

Obviously they'll have to offer a full refund on the Telus hardware (about $300, that goes without saying), but the losses in my case will be much higher than that. Even a full refund of the total service fees paid to date will barely cover the investment I've made based on their assurance that this service would continue to be available for the foreseeable future.

Not to mention the inconvenience.

And their half-hearted lies about the real reason for the service termination isn't going to do them any good. The representative I was speaking with admitted that the real issue is too much bandwidth usage.

But the plan is called "Unlimited", not "Limited to about 5GB bandwidth per month".

Telus is making the mistake of trying to redefine the word "Unlimited" to mean something less.

I suspect that this is going to get very very messy.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Cancel your Telus service, sign up with SaskTel's unlimited plan for $75/month. Problem solved (for a while...).

Anonymous said...

Thanks for that tip.