Sep 01, 2001, 11:40am

Yikes. September 1 already.

Before I get into this thing, FOLKS. You do know that you can participate on this page by entering in visitor comments for each and every rant, dontcha? Looking at the logs for this site, it gets a healthy 250 or so unique visitors a day. But almost nobody posts comments. Look at the bottom of this rant - see the line? See to the right in the small text it says X Comments | Reply | Link ? If you click on reply, you get a popup where you can post your comments. Clicking on Comments shows you what others have said. And if you want a hyperlink to this specific rant, you can right-click the Links text and copy the shortcut.

Anyway, not that I'm desperate or anything.... :-)

Oh yeah, the subject of this rant. I'm TELUS FREE AGAIN Baybee! Lord Almighty, I'm free at last!

See, I really don't like the monopolistic telco we have in BC, called Telus. I call them Smelus. They used to be BC Tel. I called them BC Hell. I've written past rants about how crappy the telco is and why I have a personal hate-on for them, so I won't go into it again. But my dislike of them is big enough that in 2000, I managed to become Telus-Free for the first time: My landlines were through Sprint Business, and my cell phone was from Clearnet.

Then Telus bought Clearnet.

Then things went downhill.

Smelus started chopping services Clearnet offered for free. Like address lookups on surf plans. Like QNC for quick email connecting via a data cable (which cost $80 or more). And dumbing down (and limiting greatly) the voice mail service. And charging for caller id, etc etc. And Telus started offering one rate plan out East, and a crappier version of the same rate plan out west - for instance, the "Talk 20" Plan with Clearnet was voice mail, caller ID, call forwarding, and 200 minutes a month for $20 plus fees. Telus took the plan and in the East, it was still 200 minutes, but took away the other "perks", making them chargeable services. They jacked the per minute charges. Then out West, they hacked the 200 minutes to 150 minutes for the same dollar amount.

Anyway, I was grandfathered on my Clearnet Plan (I had the Talk 20 with free weekends) till June 30, 2002, but Telus was doing other things to make me switch to one of their new plans... plans that they force you to sign a 3 year contract on (yes, Telus is bringing back the dreaded 3 year, no escape clause contract)... like taking down towers in the Clearnet net out west, and shipping them back east. Leaving us out west on Clearnet fones (which for some time had a different Mhz than Telus phones) with poorer and poorer reception.

And many other gripes. Anyway, I did something about it. Initially I was going to sign on with www.fido.ca (Fido, or Microcell) once they offered a GPRS fone so I could have high speed Internet connections on the go. But they have a current special on - for $30 a month I get 100 mins, free evenings and weekends, voice mail, caller ID, call forwarding, call conference and a few other services. This special is in place till Sept. 31. On top of that, per minute charges are 20 cents, US roaming charges are less than half of Telus' rates, and LD for North America is flat rate 10 cents a minute. AND I got a pretty decent fone (non GPRS and non WAP, but SMS to the gills) for $50 at the cash register - I thought it would be $200 plus taxes then I get $150 off my bill, but that wasn't the case. The phone was $50 after an instant rebate. Sweet.

Jean will be getting my new phone in a month or two when I switch to a GPRS phone like the Ericsson R520 or T39 (both also have bluetooth and IR for com with my notebook and iPaq - sweeeeeeet!), but in the meantime, I'm really happy I switched to "the dog". Smelus sucks.

12 comments | reply

Mixelania

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Canon 5D
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Alzo Digital Lights
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Canon Xsi dSLR
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