New internet service...

Ok, so it's been a LONG time since I updated this, I know. Sorry. Anyway, rather than catch everyone up on the past few months, I'll just start from now. So last week we had a couple of power outages within a few hours. After the second one, my ADSL modem stopped connecting with Telus' internet service. It would take them about 5 days to send someone to check it out. So, I set up an appointment, and go to work. Then I get to thinking, I've been wanting to switch to shaw for a while anyway. So the following evening, I call Shaw to set up installation. They were very helpful, and though I called them about 36 hours after I called Telus, they were able to make the appointment for only 24 hours after Telus could. So then I call Telus to cancel the appointment and try to cancel my service. Well, the guy (who hardly speaks English, and made me repeat myself about 5 times for everything I said so he knew what I was saying) tells me that he's cancelled the appointment, but that he can't cancel my service. I have to talk to "sales and retention" so he transfers me, but they're not open so I go back to him, though it takes him a while to realise this, and I'm sitting there listening to background mumbling for a good 2 minutes before he clues in that I'm on the line with him. He says that they're close 'till Monday morning (this was Friday evening) so I ask him to talk to a supervisor, he says they're all in meetings for the next three hours. After countless times on hold and him thanking me for "patiently waiting" every time he returned, he finally patched me through to customer service (instead of tech, which he was, since I wanted to cancel my tech appointment). Customer service tells me that sales and retention are open the following morning. This is somewhat acceptable (though I'm not sure what 24 hr service means if they can't access the entire system 24 hrs a day). Finally I call back the next morning, and I'm able to get them to cancel my service. (Like there was ANY chance I was going to change my mind after what I'd gone through the previous night.)

So yesterday, the guy from Shaw comes over. At no charge he finds a way to get a cable connection up to the computer room, checks the connection, but sees that it's quite weak. So he goes and gets a signal booster from his van, hooks it up, and now it's nice and strong. We go to the computer to check the bandwidth now. From Telus I was getting around 500Kbps down, and probably around 100Kbps up. Immediately I'm now getting 5000Kbps down (yes 10X what I had) and about 500Kbps up. Then he calls in to the office to activate the "eXtreme" connection (which I pay $10 more a month for), and within about 2 minutes my connection speed doubles. The link included (click on the title of this post) will take you to an image of the results of a test I did today, to make sure I'm still getting the same type of connection. The slight drop is caused by the fact that I now have it going through a router. Still, quite impressive for those who are tech savvy enough to know what any of this means.