While the Internet is down, I feel like I have lost my arms!
A couple of weeks ago I wondered if I could get faster DSL service from my ISP, Telus, a telephone company that has the local monopoly in Alberta and British Columbia. I had been reading about new Super DSL available in some areas of the United States, and had been spoiled by the 6x faster service while teaching last Spring at the BCIT technical college.
It turns out I cannot ever have faster service, because of my distance from the central office -- I am stuck at 1.5Mbps.
As I investigated, I discovered that I was still on an old service plan (called Velocity) that (1) Telus no longer sells; (2) costs $12/mo more than the current equivalent; and (3) has half the bandwidth. I was one of Telus' oldest high-speed Internet customers, but in all their marketing phone calls and letters -- begging me to switch back to their more-expensive-than-the-competition long distance plans -- Telus never told me about the lower cost Internet plan.
So I switched to the new plan, saving me $144 a year. The other benefit is that I now get 60GB of bandwidth, up from 30GB (which I had been bumping up against).
The switchover happened last Tuesday morning, and got screwed up. Under the old system, I had to manually enter MAC addresses; the new system is supposed to do it automatically, but failed to do so. It took an hour on the phone to figure that out, and then another 2 hours before the automatic registration kicked in.
Then it stopped again. And started again. For three days, the Internet went down for 30 minutes to 18 hours. A technician was scheduled to come by, but this is a worrying visit: if the fault belongs to Telus, the visit is free; if the fault lies with my networking setup, I pay.
Two hours before the techie was to visit, she called. When Telus upgraded my service, they didn't switch my line over to a new port. The old port was partially incompatible with the new system, and so kept disconnecting.
So far, it now works correctly. But I wonder for how many years I paid $144 too much.
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