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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Who's Your ISP?
- Hits: 2044
The owner, he's gotten a bill he doesn't understand. Final notice, imminent disconnect, Xplornet. An ISP, Internet Service Provider. He doesn't use, uses Platinum instead, something about the letter smacks of disregard and discard, something else, I dunno...
So I look up Platinum Internet on the web, a hunch, nothing there. And Xplornet, nothing there as well...
Chuck it away, it's garbage, final notice from who? Fucking hell...
But I have my misgivings, and finally I dig the final notice out of the garbage, final notice on a $55.00 balance, and give them a call.
15 minutes on hold. 15 minutes, listening to bad pop songs like "James - Bare Naked Ladies', which isn't so bad, but really, if you're listening to it on a call to your not-ISP while on hold you're probably not loving it so much...
I'm irate by the time they answer, ask how long I've been on hold, she doesn't know (they all know and have displays that show how long each caller waited...), quiz her about the bill, oh, didn't they tell us, they were supposed to, Platinum was bought out by Xplornet, really they were supposed to let everyone know...
And she knows, clearly she knows, a 15 minute wait time is a pretty good indication that they're pretty busy fucking things up, and when I point out that maybe they should have let us know - them being the new ISP and all, and really, it's not like the exiting company is going to make any big efforts to advise their clients, their interest is done, the denials start, and now she's trying to talk us into setting ourselves up on prepaid debit, and I'm thinking this is just a set up for even more incompetence to follow, no mention on either of their websites about the merger or takeover, but they're ISP's they're not web or IT or tech guys, still, there's really no excuses...
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Who's Your ISP?
- Hits: 2108
Need internet at the new place, call Shaw. They've done away with the 30 days to disconnect rule, well, they didn't, the CRTC did, but they found a new way to get me, a $30.00 instillation fee. It would have been free if I would have booked it online, but then if I had an internet connection I wouldn't be calling them...
$70 per month for 30 mb/s, amongst the most expensive internet access worldwide, but for the first 6 months they'll discount it by half. I have half a mind to pin my wifi code & password to the hall door so the neighbors can all cancel theirs, or maybe we could pool as a building...
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Who's Your ISP?
- Hits: 2412
This a story of double dealings and abuse of monopoly by Telus. OK, the narrator is annoying as hell, but not nearly as annoying as the abuse of monopoly as executed by Telus.
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Who's Your ISP?
- Hits: 2180
How much, did you ask? About 1 penny per Gigabyte Download. Add another 7 cents for the cost of the line (maintenance) and you have a stellar 8 Cents a gigabyte, or $28.00 a month if you used every last one of the 350 Gigabyte cap.
Link: http://www.calgaryherald.com/business/Internet+services+marked+study+says/4547037/story.html
Mind you, most people use far, far less and probably weigh in at around 5-10 GB a month. So their profits? Well, again, the salaries say it all.
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Who's Your ISP?
- Hits: 2986
Now imagine that you owned a cable company that made exorbitant sums of money over charging people for things like Pay Per View Movies. $6.00 a movie overcharging. And it worked for years, decades even, and you were able to pay your children (and executives, in the rare instances they weren't your children) tens of millions of dollars a year.
But then along came a company - Netflix - with a different business model. One that involved paying a nominal monthly fee ($8.00) that allowed you to stream or download as many movies as you wanted each month for the same price that you charged for a single Pay Per View Movie. What would you do? Would you challenge your children to come up with a competitive business model? Would you perhaps adjust their salaries to reflect the new "tough" times? Or would you lobby the CRTC to allow you to impose a bandwidth cap and charge users for downloads and internet usage? (thereby recouping some of your losses)...
We know what Shaw's doing. Visit stopthemeter.ca and sign the petition to make the internet - and cable company - a slightly more competitive place. Before it's too late. And really, does Jim Shaw need any more of your money to fund his drunken "tell it like it is" luncheons?