I Hate My Internet Provider

I will probably end up publishing this from the library today because our Internet has been more off than on for the last while. One of the downsides to living out in the country is that you have two options for Internet: dial-up or satellite. The ironic thing is that we live in a probably one of the wealthiest counties in the province and many people choose to live outside the city on acreage's and such but there isn’t any company interested in providing decent amenities to match people’s choices. Of course it comes down again to the peculiar Canadian mindset about service. The attitude is prevailingly “as long as I am still getting paid - no one can make me work any harder than I feel like working”.

Our provider, Albertacom, is a dinky two guy operation located in Edmonton. One of the guy’s has his wife answering the phone and taking messages. That’s the extent of staff. I imagine that the two fellows spend most of their time doing installations, which might explain why they loathe to perform service calls to check on the equipment when something isn’t working properly. Their standard line has been that we need a new router and Rob resisted for a while but haven’t the recent upgrade to the system to make it faster, we went from slow to no internet nearly half the time or better. So, Rob got a new router. It worked for about a day. Then the same old problem - it would go down and stay down. He moved the router from the basement into our office upstairs. Same result. We switched to my old Airport. Same result. In desperation, Rob searched out some programming updates and updated the old router. Nothing.

What we need is for someone to come out and do a service call, but after dozens of calls and emails - they won’t even reply to a message from us anymore.

My advice to anyone in the Edmonton/Fort Saskatchewan area of Alberta is to totally avoid Albertcom as an Internet provider. They are only in it to collect a monthly charge. You won’t get service from them.