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This has nothing to do with Canada’s Economy

Videotron is a Montreal based internet/TV/telephone provider – after the 2002 deregulation in Canada, internet providers were allowed to provide voice over internet protocol, services, basically, they were allowed to compete with Bell Canada – until then the sole provider of telephone services.

Since then there’s been an explosion in demand, seriously eroding Bell Canada’s profits and market share.  One reason was the price that Bell Canada was charging had become ridiculous – for what I was paying Bell Canada for phone service I could get the internet cable TV and phone service, so me and many others jumped ship (everyone was surprised starting with Videotron). 

Now to my story:  Saturday morning I realized that the internet was no longer functioning – nor was the phone.  After resetting the modem and the router the phone came back, but the internet was gone.  So I called Vidoetron service number.

I call these guys at 8:30 AM Saturday morning, expecting voicemail.  My wife expecting a bunch of well placed expletives from me decides she had better things to do and went to make some coffee. 

Imagine my surprised after entering my account number and date of birth; I was connected to a real live technician. A really nice guy, with who determined that my cable modem was dead.  The technician informed me that he was scheduling a call for a technician to come to our home THAT SAME DAY, between 9:00 and 17:00.

Imagine my surprise when at 10:30 the door rang, and there was a technician standing in my doorway with a modem in his hand!  10 minutes after installing the modem it was determined that the current surge had blown my Ethernet ports on my wifi routers and my desktop machine (since it’s a MAC it also has a wifi port that was unaffected).

 By noon everything was repaired and a new Apple router was purchased.  I just could not believe it, hearing from my American friends suffering at the hands of AT&T or other service providers when no human can be reached or service calls are suddenly cancelled with no notification.  

I interacted with two technicians and in the space of two hours everything was fixed..incredible!.

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