Have I been too hard on telecommunications provider TELUS in some of my writing? Maybe. Some of my concerns arise from my personal use of the company’s services, for a cell phone, and, over several decades now, also for a landline.
However my strongest ire arises from calls the company makes to others telling them they must switch from their reliable copper landline to the fibre service that TELUS has been rolling out, one community at a time, across Metro Vancouver, as well as elsewhere in the province.
I don’t particularly want to revisit that aspect, but unfortunately the company persists. The story is basically this. TELUS wants customers on its fibre network so that it can sell its TV, security, and other high bandwidth services. When fibre comes to an area, TELUS salespeople ratchet up the pressure to get customers, at least for those still with a copper landline, to switch away from it to the fibre version.
In some cases, the call comes with an indication that copper landline service is about to be shut down. I’ve experienced this myself, three times. There is no shut down date. If and when it comes, I say to the callers, let me know and we’ll talk about it.
Copper landlines are reliable, and they tend to keep working during extended power outages. I’m keeping mine as long as I can. I know copper lines will eventually be phased out, but until that day arrives I’m doing everything I can to keep mine.
More pressing for me at present is the virtually unusable cell phone service in my immediate area, and for a handful of nearby blocks. I routinely see questions about this posted in my local area Facebook community group.
Here’s a recent example.
“Question for the area – have been with TELUS mobile for a long time and reception is awful. It is a known problem area, but is not being addressed anytime soon. Anyone have this issue and switched to another provider with success? I don’t want to make the switch if most cell providers are relying on the same cell towers and will result in no difference in service.”
Numerous residents weighed in, mostly with the “switch to company X from company Y” type of answer, and none with specific experience in the problem blocks.
Here’s how I answered the poster. “I have been reporting this to TELUS for certainly 15 years. At least my phone no longer connects to Walnut Grove. When it does connect it is to Guildford these days. A year or two ago I finally got TELUS to agree I should not be paying full fee for a less than full performance package. They agreed to a permanent $15 a month discount. I think it should have been more but so be it.” I hasten to add that I don’t live in either of the communities to which my phone is connecting.
I went on to note that I’ve written a few newspaper columns on the TELUS situation, including on the company’s pressure tactics to get people to give up their copper landline, and noting not everyone needs TELUS fibre. Unsurprisingly, several replied to make note of their own experiences, some saying they were no longer able to use existing phone jacks in their homes, others that the service was proving unreliable, and yet others who noted that they saw no material difference in anything (some of these claimed they had been promised faster internet service that didn’t materialize).
So why am I not going after some, or all of the other telecommunications providers? For landlines, the answer is straightforward. Until deregulation swept across North America, there was just one telco in this province, the B.C. Telephone Company, later known as BC Tel. It owned the copper infrastructure that brought telephone service to pretty much every home in B.C. In 1985 BC Tel incorporated BC Cellular to handle the nascent cell phone field.
BC Tel merged with Alberta-based TELUS in 1999, the new entity becoming the second-largest telco in Canada, after Bell. After some discussion, the initially adopted name, BCT, was dropped in favour of the TELUS name. Around the time of the merger, cell phone adoption was exploding, competing with copper lines, new players entered the field, essentially beginning a period of disruptive change for telecommunications.
Actually, I wasn’t going to get back into the arguments over the home phone and copper landlines until my mother received a letter from TELUS just ahead of my deadline. The letter noted that her neighbourhood now has fibre in place and that she should book to have her home phone “upgraded” by a specified date. The letter used the terminology that “this upgrade is mandatory.” It also suggested that this was part of the company’s “commitment to be carbon neutral by 2030.”
Environmental claims aside, it is the use of “mandatory” that has me livid. my mother has no need of, nor desire for, any upgraded telephone service. She wants to keep that copper landline. I assured her that this wording was disingenuous. I phoned TELUS to once again get the correct picture. Of course the frontline customer service people have been told to say that indeed copper landlines are being shut down now. I requested a supervisor and confirmed, as indeed I have for the past six years, that copper lines are not in fact being shut down. Perhaps one day, yes, and certainly not without formal notice.
TELUS needs to stop this practice of targeting seniors for mostly needless switches to their fibre service. And while they are at it, they should come clean on the price for a copper landline. My mother is paying $7.45 a month! I’ve heard from people paying up to $30 a month. There does not seem to be a clear rate structure for these legacy landlines.
TELUS, like all telecommunications providers in Canada, operates within a regulatory framework. In this regard, it’s high time that the regulator, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, addressed TELUS’s tactics.
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