Country Miscalculation

A salesman for one of the big cable conglomerates came to our door. We don’t live in the typical door-to-door type of neighbourhood, so this was unusual. It certainly is unusual, he said – your area finally has in-home high-speed Internet available!

Well, we had to know more. Currently, we use a cellular hotspot via a reconditioned phone we picked up second-hand. The Internet is unlimited and the cost is reasonable.

We quite liked this sales guy. He explained everything thoroughly and it appeared that for about 2/3 of our current Internet bill, we’d get direct high-speed connectivity. We asked a million questions. He gave a million answers and we decided to sign up.

It’s a good thing I didn’t cancel our previous service.

The company installed a small dish on the side of our house and a modem inside. The technician pronounced the signal “excellent”. We changed all of our electronics settings to this signal. It dropped within an hour of his departure. I rebooted the modem. It dropped again. This went on a few times. I called tech support who told me it was “still intermittent. Please give it another day”.

Another day later, it was no better. I called again. They sent a technician to replace the modem. He left before the signal came up and we had to call that night when it hadn’t connected.

The thing never worked correctly. On my fourth call to tech support, I asked them to remove the hardware and to cancel our order. The woman said, Hmmm, you’re the only one in the area on the service. And that led her to ask questions of her colleagues and discover why the service was so poor.

We live in Southwold Township. Most of that Township resides in Elgin County. However, our sliver of Southwold is in Middlesex County. It turns out that the service is available throughout Middlesex County with the exception of Southwold Township. Are you still with me? It was never going to work here. At least, not yet.

This giant company can do many things but reading a map doesn’t appear to be one of them. In short, it was a colossal waste of time and resources that ultimately, we all pay for.

I packaged up the modem and sent it back at their expense. All of the charges for installation have been reversed. They haven’t asked us to return the dish. I’m considering turning it into a birdbath in the spring.

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