Saskatchewan

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Why I Need Fast, Reliable, and Unlimited Internet Access

That I even have to explain why I need fast, reliable, and unlimited internet access speaks volumes to how Canadians and Americans (whose internet situation is only slightly better than ours) have been indoctrinated to perceive internet usage: as something frivolous and unnecessary.

So I will tell you that I need fast, reliable, and unlimited internet access because my livelihood depends on it.

I run a transcription business. I have been doing so for five years now. I have no idea what it is people think I do all day, to be honest, because, based on some of the comments I’ve received about my need for internet, it seems that folks think I’m on Netflix all day or something. There is zero comprehension that my anger, frustration, and impatience at my internet situation are driven by a much more powerful emotion: fear.

Those of you who have ever run your own business know how hard it is to do so. I’ve been able to work solely for myself for four years now and for the last two and a half, I’ve been turning a profit and making a decent income. Of course, work comes in peaks and valleys, but I can ride out the slow months now. I have a solid stable of clients and an immense freedom of schedule. Every time that I have an internet outage or that speeds slow to a crawl is a moment that threatens the very foundation of my life.

Here’s what I use internet for on a daily basis, how my internet situation makes these things difficult, and why the solutions people give me simply don’t work for my situation.

–Downloading files from clients using Dropbox, FTP, Hightail, or even receiving them as email attachments.

Just for work files, I can go through 20GB to over 100GB of bandwidth in a month, depending on how many video files I receive. Again, this is business usage! I’m not downloading TV shows or streaming Netflix. This bandwidth represents my monthly income.

Slow internet means that it can take forever to download anything. I usually have to turn down rush jobs that pay very well because I know I won’t have time to download the files and type them in the allotted amount of time.

Flaky internet means that downloads often drop. This is a major issue with the Hightail file sharing service in that if the connection drops in the middle of downloading a 1GB file, I have to start all over again, wasting both time and bandwidth.

Every client I’ve taken on has a clause in the contract that says that their subcontractors must have fast and reliable internet access. So there is no sympathy for me on days when the wind is blowing the wrong way, service is very spotty, and it takes me so long to download a file that I don’t have enough time left to type it by the deadline. I just don’t get paid for those files.

I lost one really good client because I had to work on their proprietary online platform rather than downloading files to my computer and it would take me about five times as long as anyone else to stream their audio and so I wasn’t able to meet the production metrics.

People who are unable to sympathise with my internet connection and/or don’t get just how much I need to download for work will tell me, “Just download overnight,” or “Go up the hill to the good signal once a day to download.” This isn’t a solution. If I’m up the hill for six hours a day downloading, I’m not in my office typing and earning income. If I start a download overnight and it times out, then I have the risk of the files not being ready for me to type in the morning.

–Communicating with clients by email and Skype.

This is one area where I know that very few people understand what it means to rely on the internet for communication purposes in a business setting. I cannot believe the number of people who have told me to check and send emails twice a day, once in the morning and once in the evening, and not worry if I can’t receive or send anything during the day.

I communicate daily with my clients throughout the day. Some days are quieter than others and then there are days when I can’t get any real work done because emails won’t stop coming in. When internet drops and emails don’t come in in a timely fashion or the connection is so flaky that I can’t send even a small attachment, that affects how I look professionally. There’s nothing like getting and replying to a message with “URGENT” in the subject line an hour late to tell your clients that you’re not professional and not reliable.

Until I was able to get my better booster (thank you again to everyone who understood why I needed help with making the purchase and generously donated), I frequently had to pack up my computer and park my truck at the top of the nearest hill in order to send work. That is all time that I am not at my desk earning money.

Also, I have clients all over the world. Last summer, I was doing some projects out of Tunisia and Senegal and my client needed to speak to me from Dakar, shooting me an email asking if “now” was a good time to Skype as that was obviously the best way to do it. Skype sometimes works at home, but I can’t rely on it not dropping out and this had been a particularly bad day for internet. I replied that I needed 20 minutes, then hurriedly packed up my computer and drove to the nearest spot with a decent signal. Well, my client had been available 20 minutes before, but not then, and I had to sit up there for 30 minutes before he was available again. Again, this was time that I lost out of my day when I could have been making money and which threatened making a deadline on a project.

This happened again recently. A client in Kansas City wanted to Skype at his convenience. He’s a busy doctor and making an appointment doesn’t work well. When I was in Mexico, he knew that if Skype said I was in the office, he could call me and I’d be able to drop what I was doing and deal with him. Here, we had to try three times before we were able to make a satisfactory connection.

–Doing research.

I transcribe a lot of highly technical material and so am constantly on Google researching spellings and other information needed to properly transcribe my files. A lot of my legal work has addresses, so I’m using Google Maps. Google does not work well unless you have a blazing fast connection. A simple Google search, not even in Maps, can take me ten minutes or more on a bad day.

I used to highlight those instances in my files and then, at the end of the day, look everything up at once. First of all, this took as much time as making each search individually. Second of all, I often would type these things phonetically. If I couldn’t find my answer based on my phonetic spelling, I would have to rescan the audio file to find that particular word or phrase and try other phonetic spellings. It was very time consuming and inefficient.

As a final note, I really shouldn’t have to waste my time writing all these letters and posts, making all these phone calls, and pleading for a service that the vast majority of the rest of the world takes for granted.

Just think for a minute of the hours I have put into demanding 21st century-level internet in my part of Saskatchewan and how much income I have sacrificed to give this project all that time.

Would I really be doing that if internet access was something that, really, I could do without? Or if, “Taking a deep breath and trying again in a few hours when the internet works better” was a viable option? Or that I would have pleaded for help to buy that better booster if I didn’t truly believe that I was going to lose the best contract of my life because I couldn’t reliably receive and send emails with small attachments?

If you think that the answers to any of those questions is no, then you’re part of the reason why Canada is far behind most of the rest of the world in matters of telecom. You really need to get out of this discussion so that those of us who want to move into the 21st century can get things changed.

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I Am Accusing SaskTel Management of Corruption

I talked with some neighbours tonight about our internet disaster after their son (hi, Zack!) brought some of my blog posts to their attention. After some emails with the attorney essentially representing me at the recent CRTC hearings and conversations with neigbours who have been here longer than I am, I am ready to flat out accuse SaskTel management of corruption and of accepting kickbacks/bribes or other illicit financial incentives from at least two sources. What makes their behaviour particularly contemptible is that they are a crown corporation. Therefore, I am also accusing both the Saskatchewan and Canadian governments as well as the CRTC of colluding in that corruption.

Accusation number one is related to the land on which sits the infamous Scout Lake Tower that serves no one but a couple of very isolated farmsteads.

One of SaskTel’s arguments for not provided the Sylvan Valley with service is that we’re not enough people. We are several hundred people. Why are the handful of homes up there more important than the hamlet of St. Victor and the surrounding farmsteads?

SaskTel also says that that the Scout Lake tower is serving the number two highway between Rockglen and Assiniboia. The highway was already serviced by the Rockglen and Assiniboia towers.

An independent company I contacted to get information about what it would cost to get a repeater installed in the valley used GIS systems to overlay existing service, population, and topography and could not find a logical reason why the Scout Lake tower was put where it is.

The only thing that SaskTel have not commented on is what sort of deal was made with the person who owns the land on which the Scout Lake tower versus what discussions were had with landowners down here in the valley.

In short, every single one of SaskTel’s reasons for placing the Scout Lake tower where they did is unfounded and it is not unreasonable to assume that the reason was for their benefit, not that of the population they are supposed to serve.

Accusation number two is tied to the local satellite service provider, Xplornet. SaskTel is inexplicably pushing Sylvan Valley residents to adopt Xplornet satellite internet.

First of all, it is inconceivable to me that a modern internet service provider claims that satellite is a reasonable way to provide internet access anywhere but an ice floe or that it is truly “broadband” internet. Satellite has latency, meaning you cannot use it for Skype, Netflix, and other similar services. It looks good on paper in terms of speeds and bandwidth allowances, but there are bandwidth restrictions at peak hours.

And that’s if the service works at all. My aforementioned neighbours will be the first to testify that Xplornet is a scam. The service does not work and customer service is non-existent (canceling the service proved to be nightmare for my neighbours).

That SaskTel is pushing this service means that, at best, they are completely out of touch with internet needs in the 21st century and, at worst, that they have some sort of financial arrangement with Xplornet.

Moreover, the entire Sylvan Valley has landline telephone service. It stands to reason that those wires need servicing. I frequently see SaskTel trucks down here in the valley working on the telephone lines. How is it that no one has thought that when they do that, they should upgrade service with the goal being to connect us to DSL?  The last DSL connection is only 16KM away on both the east and west roads out of the hamlet.

When I suggested upgraded phone lines, which would provide us with hard wired internet, something that would be preferable to cellular, I was mocked by SaskTel for having no understanding of how this sort of infrastructure development happens and is budgeted for. Yet, this is the solution that everyone from that independent company looking at our cellular issues to other ISPs and local residents has come up with as being the most sensible. Rather than do something like that, SaskTel prefers to do minimal work on our telephone lines and push satellite service on us. Something doesn’t add up.

The CRTC hearings proved to be a joke. Recommendations were made, but nothing changed and the government continues to give our ISPs full rights to deny service if they don’t want to provide it, no matter the reason. In SaskTel’s case, that reason obviously goes deeper than them not wanting to spend some money. Obviously, whatever kickbacks they are getting by denying us service are worth more to them than all the potential future revenue they would get from hundreds of customers down here in the Sylvan Valley.

As for the Canadian government colluding with them, their idea of what sort of service Canadians should have is so far behind the rest of the world that it must be considering as hilarious as it is sad.

I am leaving Canada because of internet access issues. But I will continue to fight the fight from abroad in the hope that one day I can come home to the place I decided I wanted to put down roots and actually be able to earn a living without wasting all this time arguing for a service that is a given in the rest of the developed world and in much of the developing world.

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Trip Update

As May rolls over into June, I a lot of people are asking me if I’ve bought a plane ticket or have an itinerary yet. Nope. I’m waiting for my passport to show up before that happens.

This delay has been really good because it’s given me time to sit and think about a lot of things I just couldn’t focus on before.  I’ve learned that, really, a ticket and final itinerary are the last things I should be thinking about!

So I have not been idle. I will do individual posts about the following items when things are more set, but here’s what I’ve been working on:

  1. Reducing expenses back home while I’m gone;
  2. Finding healthcare coverage (you apparently cannot enter Bulgaria without a proof of health insurance);
  3. Ensuring that I have insurance coverage for home and my personal effects while away (I got a huge surprise that could have been disastrous);
  4. Understanding the Schengen Area rules, something that will really affect my itinerary and could mean not making Bulgaria my first stop, as well as affecting where I will spend my winter;
  5. Planning my packing list and doing a lot of online shopping;
  6. Trying to learn even a smidgen of Bulgarian and at least getting used to the sound of the language (I can say, “Beer, please” and thank you at this point because I have my priorities straight. Next up, “Where’s the bathroom?”);
  7. Making as much money before I go as I can because I’m really starting to dip into my savings! It would be really nice to not feel rushed to “land” when I get across the pond.

Passport Canada says that it takes up to 20 business days for a passport renewal to arrive. Today marked the halfway point. I will hopefully have my passport by June 14th and then plan to leave in the 10 to 14 days following that. I’ll know my passport is on its way when the credit card charge goes through so I’ve been checking my bank account daily!

This is a huge leap I’m about to take and I have to tamp down my enthusiasm and be pragmatic about it otherwise I would be able to focus on work or get a good night’s sleep! But, believe me, I’m excited!

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A Worthwhile Muddy Drive

Today was the Willow Bunch Community Garage Sale. I don’t know if it’s the population dwindling or if it was the weather, but not very many people participated. As I drove through town looking for balloons and signs around 9:30, I thought my outing would be a bust. Ha!

I drove past the first home that had stuff for sale because it seemed too small to be worth my time. Silly Rae! I went back, thankfully, and found something I have been looking for for ages:

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It’s a small good quality dry erase monthly calendar. I’ve been using a dry erase board for years to track my transcription load, but there was only room to write out a week at a time. You might be surprised that I don’t use an app for that, but I haven’t found a calendar or task app that can let me manage my queue in an effective manner. I can just glance at the board, with each of my clients being colour-coded, and easily move things around. This will get a lot of use!

I also found these:

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They are real leather and are brand new. I will be really happy next time I head to Mexico to have so many good pairs of sandals at the ready!

Then, I went to the library as they were advertising books and magazines for very little. With my line of work, I’m often too brain dead to read anything substantial in the evening, but magazine articles are just the right length. Well, the library took advantage of me:

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The sign said to fill a bag for 25 cents so I was trying to not be greedy and just grabbed a few of whatever titles that interested me, like Our Canada, Canadian Living, and Canadian Geographic. One of the library ladies said, “Oh, someone wants magazines! Yay! What are you interested in?” I told her and she put all the rest of the aforementioned magazines in my bag, a couple of National Geographics, and a bunch of Tastes of Home (good recipes). She would have kept going with more, but that was enough! I paid 50 cents for this whole stack. I can’t wait for the next nice afternoon that I can knock off around 4:00 and go sit in my swing with some of these and my last cold beer!

Next stop was the thrift store. I got a nice tee-shirt and a not-so-nice (pilly and a bit worn) maxi skirt that will be great for just wearing around the house when I’ve got projects on the go and don’t want to have to worry about stains. I also found:

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These are heavy duty appliance casters (wheels) that should work well for my plan to build a rolling platform for my table saw.

And then, for nostalgia’s sake, I picked this up:

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These are the exact kinds of locks we used when I was in high school. Twenty years later, I still remembered how to spin it. The combination is on the back so, yes, I was able to test it. And, yes, I need to memorise said combination and remove the sticker! 🙂

Next stop was a house advertising a bunch of tools. I showed up late and all the good stuff had been picked through, but I got an Allen key set, a mallet, and two tape measures. The guy had so many tape measures he said he’d just give me the second one, so I grabbed it! Now, I can keep one in each out building and one in the RV!

It was still a bit too early for lunch at this point (BBQ at the seniors’ centre), so I decided to mosey on over to the Willow Bunch Museum to see the new Métis room (I have an invitation to attend the official opening on June 21st). I caught up with Nichole at the front desk and then she said to pick out anything I wanted in the gift shop, like a jacket, as a thank you for all the translation I do for them! I was shocked! I tried on a few different ones and this was a winner:

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The shimmery olive colour doesn’t translate well to the screen, but it’s really luxe and will go with everything. The inside is fleece and the outside is apparently water repellent (according to the tag), although I’m not holding my breath about that.

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Can you imagine how much use I’m going to get out of it?! It’s going to be a great hiking jacket. It’s going to Bulgaria with me if I end up deciding to stay up in the mountains.

It does break one of my rules not to wear things with logos and place names:

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But I can live with it. 😉 I’m still reeling from shock at what a nice gift this is!

I then did a blip through the museum, making a note of some of the signs that I need to translate. The new Métis room is really impressive and I’ll make a point to go with my camera next time so I can do a blog write-up.

My next to last stop was the seniors’ centre for the BBB. $5 gave you a choice of a hamburger with a really skinny patty or two hot dogs, plus either water, pop, coffee, or ice cream. I went for two hot dogs with water since I was really hungry and I knew the burger would not be enough. My neighbour Caroline, two of her houseguests, and another neighbour were there, so I joined them. They’d gone for the hamburgers and ice cream. Thankfully, there was only vanilla or strawberry, so I wasn’t tempted. Plus, it was damp and cold, not ice cream weather at all! My hot dogs were good (Mexico spoiled me in that regard!), with the bun being cold but the dogs themselves perfectly BBQed (I expressly asked for the ones that were set aside for being a little too charred). We were all happy with our lunch and happy to support the seniors’ centre.

Finally, we all went to the food store to pick up a few sundries. I just wanted Chinese-style soy sauce for a pork roast marinade and it was on mega sale, yay! I also got a tub of my favourite plain Greek yoghurt for half off, woohoo!

Not counting the food store stop, my budget today was $20, $15 for shopping and $5 for lunch. I came in $2 under budget. 😀

The drive home sucked, though. It was pouring rain and the gravel road was very muddy and slick. I was slipping and sliding all over the place, even at a crawl, and really glad to get home!

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Internet Access Is the Main Reason I Am Going to Emigrate From Canada

This November will mark 20 years of my having access to the internet. And since that fateful night of discovering a service that would change my life completely, bringing me new avenues of accessing knowledge and entertainment, of communication with others, and a way of making a living anywhere, I have had to fight against Canada’s competition laws that give our tiny handful of ISPs too much power. Because there is no competition, there is absolutely no motivation to improve and expand services, and they can charge whatever they want.

I started my internet journey in this country with dial-up, as so many people did. That meant that as soon as phone service went down, so did internet access.

From 2003 to 2007, I lived in a rural community north of Ottawa, in the heart of cottage country. The best internet service I could get was 26Kbps dial-up, fully half of what dial-up service was just a few kilometres from my house. There were no plans to expand service. A local entrepreneur living in the nearest village, which had DSL broadband, had the bright idea of setting up a bunch of repeaters throughout the area so that folks like me outside of coverage could have broadband internet. All the data being used was paid for. He didn’t steal anything. Well, Bell made sure to shut him down. He had no legal recourse because of the competition laws. Never mind that he was offering a service they would not provide and that he was paying them for all the data used. I checked recently and if I still lived in that house in Quebec I would still have only 26Kbps dial-up internet and no cell service.

There were a lot of issues with the phone lines to my community and so service would go out frequently. I lost service once ahead of a massive incoming snowstorm and wanted to make sure that I could call out if needed, so I placed a service call and rated it as an “emergency.” Bell punished me for that by not fixing my service for a full two weeks (10 business days) and the guy who did the “repair” messed it up. I ended up having to fix his mess since I didn’t want to wait another two weeks (so a full month with no phone or internet service) for a repair on the repair.

In 2007, I moved to Gatineau, a large city, and was excited to have broadband internet. After 11 years of dealing with Bell, I was ready to try anyone else and moved on to Vidéotron, who were even worse in terms of customer service. Their catalogue of horrors is long enough to write a book, and I was only with them for 18 months! One of my favourite stories is that my neighbours who shared a wall were moving and asked to have their service turned off. Vidéotron turned mine off instead, said it would be up to two weeks before they could turn it back on, and that I would have to pay a $90 reconnection fee. I fought that fee until until 2009, 18 months after I canceled my service with them.

Another thing they did was that they offered an unlimited plan and then, after a few months, decided to put a 100GB cap on the “unlimited” accounts. Well, there is a silver lining to this story. Customers, including myself, filed a lawsuit against Vidéotron and… we won. The judgment came out in the last year. But, of course, it is under appeal so I doubt I will ever see a payout.

And then, I hit the road. While most of the rest of the world, even many countries in the so-called “third world” have super fast and inexpensive mobile bandwidth, Canada was slow to get on board with that idea. In 2008, there was no point in even considering cellular internet since it was super expensive and service was spotty. But within the next year or so, Canada’s various telecom providers got together and in a fit of madness upgraded cellular service across the country, with towers popping up like mushrooms. I got really excited about this, thinking that Canada was finally going to catch up with the rest of the world. And then, I saw the rates and plans.

These rates and plans really haven’t changed much over the last seven years. You’re looking at about $70 to $80 a month with Bell and Telus for 5GB of bandwidth on your phone (dedicated hot spot devices do a little better). I paid Telus $80 a month for several years for my 5GB and an additional $55 per GB. But, hey, at least I had decent speed internet almost everywhere. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth and all that.

In 2011 to 2012, I  dealt with hard wired Telus while I was in Lethbridge, both with my own personal account and with internet access in my buildings in general. Their tech support did shoddy work, they refused to replace their own poorly installed wiring, and they couldn’t figure out why I was upset that I wasn’t getting the speeds I was paying for since “at least [I had] service.”

When I moved to Saskatchewan, I went back to Bell because they had the best rate for a mobile hot spot. I have to be fair and say that other than the rates being highway robbery, they gave me good service, especially from a technical point of view, replacing my hot spot repeatedly even when it wasn’t on warranty. But I was paying something like $120 a month for 12GB of data and $10 per GB after that. I use a lot of bandwidth for my transcription business and my internet bill was somewhere around $250 a month.

So I went to SaskTel, whom I discovered have an unlimited data plan.

Most of my readers are familiar with the issues I’ve had with the lack of service in my hamlet, well detailed over last summer, so I won’t rehash those details. But I will give an update.

I’ve had okay internet since I got home because of the heavy duty booster I installed last August. Service has been a bit flaky, but nothing like what I used to experience.

Until last night.

I hit my soft cap and I suddenly could not get internet on my computer anymore and only intermittent data on my phone. I thought there might be a service issue because of the weather, so I waited until this morning to call technical support. Thankfully, I got the Indian lady who knows what she’s doing so she walked me through all the steps of resetting my network settings, bla bla bla. She finally dug deeper into her questioning and pretty much went ha ha when I said that I had slooooooow data back on my phone after doing all that, but was having trouble with my computer.

SaskTel, in their infinite wisdom, apparently made some changes to discourage users from using their phone as a hot spot after hitting their soft cap. I guess those “changes” mean that your data service flickers on and off?

This is not a “you don’t have service and use a booster” issue. I’m experiencing it even up in the cow pasture where I don’t need a booster. This is definitely an account-level issue.

Again, I am paying for unlimited data and my ISP is making it difficult for me to use data. Didn’t another ISP get its ass whooped in court for doing that?

My contract with SaskTel was up in February and I thought of signing a new one to essentially finance a newer iPhone through them (did the math with a service rep and even if I don’t use the service, I wouldn’t be paying much more for the phone over that time than if I paid for it cash today). Moving to a new contract would mean having to move to their new unlimited plan at $120 a month ($40 more than I pay now), but which would give me 15GB of “high speed” internet before being throttled, rather than 10. I thought that this would be worth it, until today. Now, I can’t wait to call SaskTel in a few weeks and tell them to go fuck themselves. Pardon my French. I’m really not sure what I’ll do when I get back to Haven next spring, but knowing that there’s no internet here means that I’ll just be that much more motivated to get my Mexico visa sorted out and start packing up.

So that’s twenty years of dealing with Canadian telecom bullshit and I’ve just had enough now that I’m seeing that this is not “normal.”

My experience with TelMex in Mexico has been the complete opposite. I heard so many negative things about them and yet they have been nothing but customer-oriented, going so far as to send technical help after dark to restore my service after an outage. I didn’t pay them, but finally found out that my landlady was paying about 350 pesos (about 27CAD) a month for unlimited 5Mbps service. I haven’t researched internet prices in all the hardwired communities in Canada, but I’m pretty sure no one is paying less than $30 a month for unlimited and reasonably fast internet.

Mexico also has tons of free WiFi hotspots that anyone can use. It took me until the middle of my second winter on Isla de la Piedra to learn that if my internet went down, I should go to the school and see if their WiFi was up since it was from a different service provider. When in Mazatlán and Mérida, I could sit on a bench in pretty park and use free WiFi instead of mobile bandwidth. And mobile bandwidth in Mexico is less expensive than in Canada, especially if you have a plan instead of doing the pay-as-you-go Amigo route. Even that isn’t a bad deal since some sites, like Facebook and Twitter, are free to use.

I’m also researching mobile bandwidth in Europe, especially Bulgaria, since I will be heading there shortly. One of the reasons why Bulgaria came to the top of my list is its world ranking for internet access, penetration, and prices. A few years ago, it was 3rd in the world, with Canada somewhere around position 130… I’ve had many people assure me that if my apartment is not hard wired, I’ll be able to rely on mobile bandwidth without going broke. I’ve started to do my research on that and am finding that basic mobile pay-as-you-go plans start around $15 for 20GB of high speed data. Bell and SaskTel offer 12GB of high speed data for $120.

“Move back to civilisation” is not an acceptable response to my internet issues at Haven. I live in civilisation and, in fact, I’ve been to truly remote locations that have internet access. Moving to a more populated area will in no way guarantee that I won’t keep butting up against Canadian telecom providers, as illustrated above. This is the 21st century and internet access should be a given. Instead, ISPs treat internet access as a giant favour they are granting to the Canadian populace. Also, our rates are some of, if not the, highest in the developed world.

I’m tired of living in a country that exists in the past. I have a lot more reasons for wanting to emigrate, but the internet situation really covers them all. It represents the government’s short-sightedness and unwillingness to grow with the times. It represents the Canadian populace’s general apathy and willingness to settle for scraps.

I am a digital nomad of the 21st century. Canada not only limits my mobility within my own country, but keeps me from earning a living while taxing me to death. I’m just done with being here. My eyes are wide open at the kind of world I’m going and I’m ready for some new challenges.