Author: Rae

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Proof That the SaskTel Governance Is the Issue

I’m scraping my jaw off the floor. I found a quote by the president of SaskTel from March of this year:

“‘High Speed Internet is essential in this day and age, whether you live in an urban or rural centre,'” said Ron Styles, SaskTel President and CEO. “Saskatchewan people deserve the same opportunities this access brings and SaskTel’s continued investment in providing this service is evidence of our commitment to this philosophy.'”

What a two-faced, lying, hypocritical rat bastard! This is the man who hasn’t answered any of my letters despite the office of the Ombudsman assuring me he would. If any of this prattle was true, his customer service team would have been advised to fix mistakes as soon as they were made aware of them.

So there’s the problem with SaskTel right there. I’ve always known it wasn’t the front line people (who are superb). With a hypocrite like this at the helm who knows that he has all the power in deciding which communities get service and which don’t, it’s no wonder nothing is getting done. Shame on him!

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Disdain For the Internet

One of the CBC reporters said something to me yesterday that was rather an epiphany. I said to him, “I want internet access to be able to work. It’s not like I’m asking to do Netflix marathons.”

And do you know what he replied?

“This is the 21st century and we’re in a developed country. Getting on Netflix shouldn’t be an issue.”

He made me realise that I’ve been mad at the wrong people, like Google and Apple, for creating services that don’t take into consideration that not everyone on the planet has super duper high speed internet with unlimited bandwidth. They’re not the problem. The problem is ISPs. And in Canada, that means the problem is the government because it has given telecom monopolies all the power to set rates and service levels.

Not only does the Canadian government have a measure of disdain for this vital resource that the United Nations declared in 2011 as being as basic a human right as access for fresh water, but so do the people who decide who can and who can’t get the service. Whenever I’ve called SaskTel, they have been flummoxed by why I could possibly need internet that badly, wondering what the hell I do with all that bandwidth every month. It’s none of their business! I have an ‘unlimited’ data plan and I pay my bill each month. What I do with the service, as long as it’s not illegal, isn’t their concern and should have no impact on their decision to give me service or not.

It’s interesting that even after 20 years of internet coming into our collective consciousness, it is still regarded as a frivolous thing by so many people. Whine about no access to television? That is a big deal. Whine about no access to internet? You’re an addict who needs to get a life.

It’s funny that things people consider to be necessities. I’ve lived long periods of my adult life without running water and electricity beyond what I could generate for myself and I have never had television. People think I’m nuts to live without those things. But I get by fine without them.

The only thing I need to have a quality of life, I have been denied at every step. When I had my house in Quebec, it was the exact same bullshit as here. I briefly had good hard wired internet in a rental house before going RVing, as well as during my Campbell River and Lethbridge winters and many other stops along the road (thank you, lovely hosts!), but otherwise I’ve struggled with mobile bandwidth being cost prohibitive. Internet access has been, and remains, as much a struggle for me as it is for folks in Nepal.

It feels like I’m getting close to the future the internet promised me so many years ago. Finally, finally, I have an unlimited data plan at a rate that is fair at this time and in this place. Right now, in this country, my plan is the pot of gold at the end of the telecommunications cable. Yes, it slows to molasses speed after I use up 10GB, something I will address in a future fight, but for the first time ever I’m not worried about how much bandwidth I use and I don’t have to pay an arm and a leg for it!

SaskTel pissed off the wrong customer. They thought that by ignoring me, they’d get rid of me. How very wrong they were. I’m savvy about the issue, understand the technology, know my way around government red tape, and am used to speaking publicly. I am also tired of dealing with this crap. Now that I’m living somewhere I’ve decided to grow roots, I will not back down until I get satisfaction.

I still believe in the good things I’ve said about SaskTel in terms of how much they’ve improved telecom in Saskatchewan in just a few years. But they have dropped the ball here with their stubbornness to rectify an obvious mistake and by treating me like I’m an idiot. I don’t live in the middle of a desert island in the high arctic, so stop telling me that I should go with satellite service.

I want 21st century internet speeds! I want to be able to sync my devices, do security updates, and send emails without any drama!

And being able to stream Netflix would be nice, too, thank you very much!

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The Plot Thickens

I had no sooner hit post on the last post when the phone rang. It was CBC Saskatchewan wanting to drive down to interview me about my internet situation!!!

A few hours later, a couple of handsome guys showed up and I was able to tell them my story in both languages (the French one said he hit the jackpot in getting a bilingual interviewee!). They were very sympathetic and outraged.

What is most interesting is that they called SaskTel to ask about our internet situation and as soon as SaskTel heard where exactly, they completely clammed up. I now know that I have stirred up the ant’s nest and that they are not actually ignoring me. The reporter said it sounds like they’re scrambling behind the scenes to come up with a response.

Stayed tuned for the next riveting installment of We Want Internet Service On the Prairie!

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An Unsustainable Situation

I haven’t said much on the subject of work these past few months, afraid to jinx myself again like I did last time something wonderful happened in that sphere. So I’m going to tread lightly with the details and say that I finally got my dream job. It’s not transcription, it pays a professional wage, and I have reason to believe that it would be long-term (there is no job security in the freelancing world). I work set eight-hour shifts three days a week and I need reliable internet because I have to respond to emails very quickly.

This is why my internet situation has become so critical this summer. I can no longer go up the hill in the morning to download work for the day and then go back up in the evening to send it. I really need to be online and available every second of those shifts. Every shift since I got this job has been incredibly stressful because I never know from one second to the next if I’ll be able to do a Google search or send an email. Now that someone is working alongside me during my shift, I know that my unacceptable internet situation is going to be coming obvious because he can respond to emails while I’m still waiting for them to come in because the attachment is so ‘heavy’ (less than 1MB).

Let me reiterate that I did my due diligence when I bought my property. I had every reason to believe that I would have internet here after the building of the new tower in 2013. But SaskTel screwed up and I have no recourse against them.

My booster is waiting for me in Plentywood and I’ll head out there first thing Friday to pick it up, then will have a four-day weekend to get it working. I don’t think I’ll want to do any permanent mounting until I’ve lived with it for a bit. I’m not expecting it to provide me with a miracle. All it will give me is, hopefully, a more reliable connection. I’ll still have the slow speeds when I’m throttled.

So the booster or a mobile office are going to be band-aids, nothing more. The fact is that this is it for internet at Haven forever because SaskTel will not bring us any sort of service except satellite, which is not much better than dial up, incredibly expensive to set up and use, and which has punitive bandwidth restrictions. They boast that I can get 40GB per month (which would be enough), but I read the fine print and there are daily restrictions that would slow me down to dial up speeds. I get better speeds than that on cellular when the connection is working okay, even when throttled.

Do you know how far hard wired broadband internet is from me? I bet you don’t and you will be surprised. I had a reader comment that I live ‘in the middle of nowhere.’ It does feel that way when you come from Assiniboia. But Willow Bunch has hard wired broadband and it is just 18KM away. When the gravel is well graded, like it was last night, I am ten minutes driving distance from the nearest house that has hard wired broadband. Ten minutes. It might as well be a hundred years because SaskTel won’t consider bringing that to my community either.

I have at least twenty working years left, possibly thirty. So if I were to spend my summers here, that would be ten to fifteen years of my life struggling with the internet.

I’ve always made plans for my current income because I’m not one to make plans for ‘the day I win the lottery.’ But now, it looks like I might have options I hadn’t anticipated. I’m mobile. Why would I come here and struggle to work when I could go anywhere in the world? All that would happen would be that I would come to resent this place I love so much. Haven will always be that, a safe port, a place to drop off stuff and to sit and breathe for a few days or weeks. I cannot anchor myself to this place at this time, but it will always be a security blanket of sorts.

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New Computer

My new Mac arrived on Friday, a full business day ahead of when UPS said it would come. I was so happy to have the weekend to break it in, but it barely took an hour before I was up and running with it.

Moving to a new computer is just so easy in the Mac world. I made one final Time Machine backup on my old unit, ejected the external backup drive, plugged the drive into the new computer, booted up the computer, told the computer to restore my data from the backup, and then walked away for about 30 minutes.

When I came back, just about all my data and settings were on the new machine. For some reason, my Filemaker Pro database is never up to date in the backups, so I retrieved that from the old unit. Then, I checked to make sure all my apps were working by opening them up one by one. I had just jumped two operating systems (from Mountain Lion straight to Yosemite without going through Mavericks), so I was surprised that the only thing that wasn’t working was iPhoto. Even iWorks ’08 was working fine.

I was also surprised that I only had about 2GB of space left on my hard drive after the move when I was only using about 100GB on the old machine. This hard drive is only 125GB, down from 250GB. So I moved my iTunes folder to an external drive to clear up a little space. I tend to only keep my backup drive accessible when I’m traveling, but I’ll now have to keep the media drive handy, too. A bit of a pain, but I wasn’t going to spend something like $300 on the 250GB hard drive when I have about 2TB of space in my external drives. Solid state drives are expensive!

The only thing I couldn’t get working right with the new computer was my external display. Its resolution isn’t compatible with Yosemite’s, which is programmed for the super high definition ‘retina’ display, so the colours were off and everything was blurry. I also can’t use the Mac in clamshell mode (lid closed) while connected to the external display unless I’m plugged into power. That wasn’t an issue with the old unit since its battery was dead, but I don’t want to kill this battery, so being plugged in all the time isn’t an option. I’ve decided to do without the external display. The resolution on the 13″ Macbook Air is such that I can see everything just fine. I’m going to move the external display to the living room and get the cable I need to hook my iPad to it so I can watch movies more comfortably out there.

Physically, my new MacBook Air isn’t much different from my old one. Only the power port has changed as I now have the wider Magsafe connector. That means that my collection of chargers, including the DC one, is now obsolete and will be part of the sale of my old unit.

Yosemite hasn’t been too bad so far. It is hideously garish, but I’ve been tweaking settings to make it a little less offensive. My biggest peeve with it so far is that the green button that used to maximize your window now takes you into full screen mode. I don’t like full screen mode and I’m annoyed that I have to remember to hold the option key before pressing the green button to get the maximize effect.

I am so far unimpressed with the new Photos app, but after spending some time talking with an Apple tech, I made the decision not to hack my Yosemite installation to make iPhoto work for me. Part of making this huge purchase was to get up to date and if that means learning the new Photos app, I will.

There are other things about Yosemite that I look forward to exploring this winter when I am on decent internet as there is now a greater compatibility with iOS. Apple is trying to get users to move everything to the cloud, but even if I had decent internet in Canada, this makes me nervous. I prefer to keep my data local, but I’m so far liking keeping the calendar and reminders in the cloud.

I am appreciating the extra RAM as this machine is much zippier and I’m also liking that I haven’t had a single runaway kernel since Friday. I really thought the old machine was going to implode before the new one got here and it just seemed to get worse and worse the closer I got to delivery day! I know that I’m going to be happy to have a working battery tomorrow when I’m forced to go up the hill to send emails and won’t have to bring the charger with me, just the computer and phone.

I still have some updates to do to a few apps and to iOS, but even though I’m unthrottled, my internet connection is terrible and I can’t get them done. This is also what’s keeping me from wiping the old machine so I can list it for sale since internet recovery doesn’t work well on this connection.

I just can’t get over the fact that I live in a first world country and I have all this amazing tech and I can’t do something so basic as download security upgrades. My government is too busy fighting imaginary boogey men and trying to rig elections to care about things like connectivity… My booster should be in Plentywood tomorrow so I’ll have it by Friday and hopefully it will make the ‘night or day’ different I was promised. If it doesn’t, then I’ll have to start thinking pretty hard about where I’ll be spending next summer. 🙁