The Big Bad High Speed Providers

Canada is the second most high-speed wired country in the world. Korea is the first with about 70% of the population. With high speed controlled by the cable and telephone companies, struggling to reinvent themselves as computer networking companies, has resulted in problems in customer support. In a country where computer savvy, not the ablility to read, is now the criteria for literacy, the government has proposed in recent years that Internet access should considered manditory for living and should be reviewed and supervised by the public sector.

Hanging around with some of the best Linux people in Toronto, there is no end of high-speed Internet customer horror stories. My personal nightmare occurred last year when Bell Canada deleted some of my email on their servers. When I contacted Bell's customer support, I was told that they had no legal obligation to restore my email and wouldn't even confirm whether or not they backed up their servers. A Bell lawyer quoted me their service (or lack-of-service) agreement and wished me a happy holiday in the boilerplate at the end of his email.

I cancelled my Sympatico account and signed up with I-Stop, a Linux DSL provider. I went to purchase a ASDL modem at local retailers in St. Catharines and was told by sales staff that Bell Canada representatives were demanding retailers to withdraw DSL modems, regardless of whether the customers were Bell customers or not. Local cable providers have been demanding third-party cable modems be withdrawn from store shelves as well.

It's not surprising that high-speed providers want to control modem rentals. DSL and cable modems are surprisingly cheap and the rentals fees rapidly pay for the modem and provide an artifical way to hide rising Internet costs.

You don't like the high-speed customer service? The largest high-speed ISP's deny your right to host your own email and web servers.

For people using email, file sharing and news, poor customer service may be an acceptable price of the Internet age. But for many Linux contractors who depend on high-speed Internet for their daily living, going to a third-party provider may be the only alternative to do serious business until the big providers get their act together--or until the Canadian government steps in and monitors the quality of service provided to Canadians.

October 6, 2004