Cellphone bills generate most complaints in telecom services once again: report

By LuAnn LaSalle, The Canadian Press - Thursday, October 25, 2012 at 6:15 AM - 0 Comments

MONTREAL – A telecom watchdog group says routine errors on cellphone bills continue to be a major headache for consumers, who often complained they were charged too much.

A report by the Commissioner for Complaints for Telecommunications Services finds consumers also say they weren’t given discounts or credits promised or their contracts didn’t reflect the services they thought they were getting.

The non-profit group helps settle disputes between consumers and telecom service providers.

It handled almost 11,000 complaints for 2011 to 2012, a 35 per cent increase from the previous year.

The complaints included wireless, local phone and long distance and Internet services.

For the last three years, complaints about cellphone services have made up more than half of the telecom services complaints, a hot button issue for consumers.

“The No. 1 complaint is what I will call routine billing errors related to regular service,” said commissioner Howard Maker, who released his annual report Thursday.

“Wireless tends to be a complaint generator,” Maker said.

Maker said a national code of conduct for Canada’s wireless providers should eventually help lower complaints.

“We think it will set minimum standards for service provider conduct and will clarify rights and responsibilities.”

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission has asked Canadians to help draft the code because consumers have said their monthly contracts are confusing and the terms and conditions can vary greatly from one wireless company to another.

This year, more than 60 per cent of the complaints to Maker’s watchdog group were about wireless services, which face numerous technological changes, he said.

“I often think the technology guys and the marketing guys get ahead of the customer service folks. So it’s difficult for the customer service folks to convey all of the information that consumers need in a timely way and in an accurate way.”

Maker also noted that his group solved 90 per cent of the complaints it received and said sometimes the solutions were glaringly obvious.

Some of the solutions were so simple that “you kind of scratch your head” and wonder why customers couldn’t get any satisfaction, he said.

“We see so many complaints that could have been avoided, in our view, with a little extra care provided by the service provider at first instance.”

The second-biggest complaint was clauses in consumers’ cellphone contracts, known as terms of service, which includes such things as early termination fees, the report said.

That underscores that consumers need to understand their contracts, Maker said.

The watchdog group also received complaints about lost smartphones and if consumers needed to keep paying their monthly contracts.

Consumers aren’t off the hook and need to be aware of their responsibilities and options, Maker said.

“Losing your device is not a basis to stop paying your monthly fees,” he said.

“Although we understand customers’ frustration with having to pay for a service that they can no longer use, the physical protection of a customer’s device is not the service provider’s responsibility,” the report adds.

The report also found that local telephone service and Internet service were No. 2 and No. 3 in generating complaints.

The main complaint with these services, again, was billing errors, Maker said. Complaints about Internet services also include disputes about usage caps.

Maker said 178 telecom service providers and brands participate in the group’s dispute resolution process.

The group is an independent, industry-financed body established by the federal government to resolve consumer complaints against telecom companies.

The trouble with Huawei

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, October 10, 2012 at 11:50 AM - 0 Comments

After seeming not particularly concerned five months ago about Huawei’s dealing with Canadian firms, the Prime Minister is now maybe concerned about the possibility of the Chinese telecommunications company dealing with the federal government.

A spokesman for Prime Minister Stephen Harper spoke cautiously when asked about the government’s plans to upgrade its communications network. “The government is going to be choosing carefully in the construction of this network and it has invoked the national security exception for the building of this network,” said Andrew MacDougall, Harper’s director of communications…

MacDougall did not say Tuesday whether this policy will exclude Huawei from winning bids for federal contracts. “I’m not going to comment on any one company in particular,” he told a news conference. “I’ll leave it to you if you think Huawei should be a part of the Canadian  government security system.”

The latest questions were raised by Greg Weston’s report for the CBC. The NDP is pointing to Huawei as a reason to be concerned about the Nexen deal. The Wall Street Journal compares Huawei’s receptions in the United States and Canada.

Chinese telecom’s Canadian ties raise security fears

By Richard Warnica - Wednesday, May 16, 2012 at 7:53 AM - 0 Comments

A former top U.S. intelligence official is sounding the alarm about a Chinese tech firm’s entrance into the Canadian telecom market. In an interview with CBC, Michelle K. Van Cleave, who was the head of U.S. counter-intelligence under George W. Bush, called Huawei Technologies a “stalking horse” for Chinese military and security designs. The company has been banned from major telecom projects in the U.S. and Australia, but has already inked partnerships with Canadian companies including Telus, Bell, SaskTel and WIND Mobile.

From the CBC:

Van Cleave says the intelligence community fears digital “back doors” could be hidden in the telecommunications networks, allowing spies to steal American and Canadian secrets and ultimately disrupt everything from public utilities to military operations in the event of international conflict.

She says the U.S. government’s actions to prevent Huawei from taking over U.S. telecom companies, or participating in major infrastructure projects, “is the right thing to be doing.”

The Harper government’s own Department of Public Safety warned more than a year ago that Canada’s telecommunications network is too important to be left to foreign companies.

In a secret memo written in 2011 and obtained under the Access to Information Act, a senior public safety official says “the security and intelligence community” believes that throwing open the Canadian telecom market to foreign companies “would pose a considerable risk to public safety and national security.”

The wit and wisdom of Ted Rogers

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, May 18, 2011 at 8:30 AM - 1 Comment

Photograph by Peter Bregg

Fifty years ago, most television programming made its way to people’s TV sets via rabbit ears. The newest mass communication technology—frequency modulation (FM) radio—was still struggling to catch on. And in Canada, the broadcasting business was dominated by the CBC. But in a few months in 1960 and 1961, a young lawyer, Ted Rogers, arrived on the scene and for the next five decades would radically shake up the media landscape, laying the groundwork for what would eventually become one of the world’s biggest communications companies.

In 1960, while still a law school student, Rogers and his then partner, media personality Joel Aldred, paid $85,000 to buy CHFI-FM, the first FM radio station in Canada. It was a bold venture, coming at a time when only five per cent of homes had FM radios. He also ventured into television broadcasting with a cold call from a law office library to media tycoon John Bassett. After wrangling a meeting for the next morning, the pair was soon pitching the Board of Broadcast governors (a precursor to the CRTC) for a licence to start the first private TV station in Toronto. In 1961, CFTO-TV hit the air, with Rogers as a minority owner. Those early forays into radio and television—marked by equal parts hard work, attitude and vision (and a little luck, of course)—would come to define the next several decades for the company, which has been celebrating its 50th anniversary over the past several months. “We were always trying to do the impossible,” Rogers wrote about the period in his book, Relentless.

Rogers credited his driving ambition to the ghost of his father, who died when he was just six years old. Edward Samuel Rogers invented the plug-in radio at a time when most radios were powered by cumbersome, messy batteries. He also started the CFRB radio station in Toronto to help increase demand for the radio sets he manufactured. But his life was cut short when he died at age 38 of an aneurysm. The business would later be dismantled, with young Ted determined to regain what had been taken from the family.

Continue…

In the future, we'll all be Bandwidth Hogs 

By Jesse Brown - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 at 1:08 PM - 21 Comments

The fact that Internet Service Providers feel comfortable calling their best customers “hogs” is a good indicator that something is not right with broadband service in Canada. It takes nerve (or a comfy monopoly) to call your own subscribers swine for using the services you offer in the exact way you offer them (“Extreme!” “Blaze Through Bytes!” “Push Your Surfing Limits!”).

Yet the broadband hog slag has been used so often to justify various “network management” practices that it’s become a default moniker, adopted uncritically by the press to describe heavy users.

(To be fair, when Maclean’s, which is owned by Rogers, published an editorial in support of usage based billing, the term “bandwidth hog” was not used.  Every other highly-contested claim and opinion of the major ISPs was repeated, but at least they didn’t call users hogs!)

But just who are these “bandwidth hogs” anyway?  My friends, they are the future of the Internet.

We are told that the average Canadian Internet user today consumes a humble 16 gigs of bandwidth per month—not like those greedy hogs who burn upwards of 100! But not long ago, sucking down 16 gigs of data would have made you a prize pig. In 2003 for example, Bell’s most expensive plan capped users at 5 gigs per month.  At the time, that may have been plenty for most users, who surfed the web, checked email, and perhaps downloaded some MP3s. But if you were interested in online video, you could easily have gone over, incurring $8/gig overage fees as you did. Hitting 16 would have cost you $88 on top of your subscription fee- call it a “hog tax”.

But those hogs of 2003 were in fact early-adopters. YouTube brought online video to the mainstream in 2005, and the average amount of data downloaded per user quadrupled over the next three years.

Today’s heavy users are downloading HD videos and using the cloud as their own personal hard drive. With 18 gig BluRay files and 100 gigabyte Dropbox accounts, these power users can easily blast through an average subscriber’s allotment in an afternoon. ISPs respond as they did in ’03, deriding them as hogs and throttling their transfers while simultaneously dinging them for massive overages.

Of course, in a year or two, downloading HD movies and storing your entire hard drive online will be mainstream activities, and ISPs will be advertising their ability to deliver them at turbo speeds. Same goes for mobile, where tethering and video streaming are today’s highly-taxed hog habits, and tomorrow’s mainstream mainstays.

Maybe instead of gouging and insulting these users, ISPs should study their habits to glean valuable predictive data that can inform how they build out their networks for the future. Maybe they’re doing both.