Shaw is ripping the wires out of its analog FM cable radio service, formerly delivered free of charge to all Shaw subscribers.

Shaw Communications’ plans to abandon its analog cable FM radio service, delivered free of charge to basic Shaw subscribers, has been met with resistance by customers who appreciated the improved reception the service delivered.

Some noted Shaw is eliminating the free service and replacing it with one that requires a digital cable subscription to receive. Shaw:

Shaw previously offered customers access to FM radio stations free of charge with their coax cable connection, as part of their Shaw service. Given that many of our customers no longer use these stations, we are in the process of removing this service across our systems.

Removing FM radio stations allows us to free up additional bandwidth, which means Shaw can deliver faster Internet speeds, increased High-Definition content and more Shaw Exo On Demand programming. This change is part of Shaw’s dedication to providing our customers with leading edge technology through our superior Shaw Exo network.

How can I access my radio stations?

The problem with both of Shaw’s options, according to readers who have contacted Stop the Cap!, is that they come at an added cost.

“Shaw would love it if we streamed those radio stations, which all count against our bandwidth cap, instead of listening to them for free on the cable radio,” says Irene Delasquay from Prince George, B.C. “Galaxie is just a music jukebox service that requires you to buy a digital cable subscription and rent a box to listen, and I don’t want all that extra equipment and expense.”

Some wonder why Shaw is discontinuing the service in the first place. Shirley and Meg Bonney told the Comox Valley Echo:

When we finally we able to speak to a person at Shaw we were told that they “didn’t think that many people were using the FM frequencies”. Had they ever inquired? Had they even tried to find out? Or had they just made a biased assumption – perhaps to try to force people to buy their digital black box in order to access even more of their own, commercial music channels?

We were also told that the CBC frequencies were a “gift” from Shaw.

Many readers who have been in touch with Shaw are being told their best alternative is streaming radio signals over a personal computer, but that presents a problem for some who don’t have a personal computer, have located it in an inconvenient room to listen, or who do not want to waste electricity running a computer just to listen to the radio.

While cable radio is no longer common in many parts of the United States, the vast expanse of Canada combined with an often-insufficient network of low-powered FM repeater transmitters, has made reception of commercial and certain public radio signals difficult, especially inside homes.

Roger and Isabel Thomas feel the loss hurts their ability to stay in touch with informative programming long-abandoned by commercial stations and cable networks:

The FM service provided us with daylong (and night-time) enjoyable, culturally stimulating, commercial free listening. It kept us abreast of national and world-wide events and allowed us to enjoy our selection of favourite music, eclectic though it may have been.

Shaw Cable has pulled the plug on its complimentary cable radio service on Vancouver Island, which used to provide enhanced FM reception of radio services from across the province and from the United States.

Listeners in the Vancouver area never received notification the service was being terminated, and a Shaw spokesman said the company did not bother because it was a free service delivered to cable customers.

Some listeners called the loss of more than 20 FM stations devastating, leaving them with as few as three clear stations, and no reception of CBC Radio 2 from Canada’s public radio network.

Kerry Hunt, Shaw’s regional manager for Vancouver Island, said the company is phasing out the FM radio service in order to increase Internet speeds and make room for additional digital cable channels.

“Nobody is installing FM anymore,” Hunt told Canada.com. “It’s just a service that is very rarely even being used.”

Gone for some B.C. listeners

Hunt called cable radio anachronistic in the digital and Internet age, and those customers who value the service are now being pushed to use Internet streaming services, offered by many of the stations listeners lost. But those streams count against the company’s Internet Overcharging usage caps, and with many of cable radio’s fans among the less-computer-savvy elderly, the expense to add broadband service to continue listening to radio stations they used to receive for free is a hardship.

Cable radio service is a legacy service, originally introduced in the 1970s and 1980s to provide enhanced radio service to cable-TV subscribers over cable-wired FM receivers. Some cable systems delivered national radio superstations, college stations not available over the air, or distant regional radio signals not well received by cable subscribers.

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission used to require all Canadian cable operators provide the service, converting all area AM signals for FM reception. Those rules have been considerably relaxed, and today most cable operators deliver the bare minimum, including one CBC Radio service, over its set top cable boxes.

Shaw says it plans to gradually discontinue cable radio service across its entire coverage area.

CHCH-TV in Hamilton, Ontario.

The cable industry seems to have an increasing problem keeping adult entertainment on the right channels.  Just a week after Colorado viewers were treated to an XXX-rated wakeup call during Good Morning America, cable viewers across western Canada and parts of Ontario got an eyeful of gay hardcore porn for several minutes Friday during CHCH-TV’s News Now AM morning news.

The unwanted programming, which also turned up in public viewing areas such as airports and diners, caused more than a few to put down the Tim Horton’s coffee and pick up the phone.

The Hamilton, Ont. television station initially got the blame. So many Canadians were talking about it, the station became a trending topic on Twitter.

“Just eating some pancakes this morning watching #CHCH … I no longer like pancakes or the news,” wrote Twitter user @derek1913.

Kelling says the scene she saw was particularly explicit.

“It went on and on,” Kelling says. “Gay or straight aside, parents will be answering questions over this one.”

So will Shaw and Cogeco Cable, who were responsible for treating viewers to the racy movie in the morning.  CHCH didn’t wait for a blow by blow explanation from either company before taking to the air with an apology.

“First of all, we would like to apologize to our viewers,” said CHCH news director Mike Katrycz. “This was a problem that originated, not at CHCH, but at a cable company. Apparently some cable lines had been cut, and in the splicing back together some inappropriate content went to air. Again it was beyond the control of CHCH, but we do apologize to our viewers.”

Cogeco, Shaw Cable, and the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council have all launched independent investigations into the matter.

Canadian cable, phone, and satellite providers have done a better job stymieing would-be “cord-cutters” than their counterparts further south in the United States.

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission’s (CRTC) annual report on the country’s telecom companies shows all of them remain exceptionally profitable, keeping pay TV customers far more effectively than American providers. Total revenues climbed from $12.5 billion to $13.5 billion in just one year, as price hikes, Internet Overcharging schemes like usage-based billing, and lack of competition continue to takes its toll on Canadian wallets.

The biggest winners were the biggest telecom companies in Canada — Rogers Communications, Bell Canada (BCE), and Shaw Communications, which all saw profits soar 8.2% to $11 billion.  Costs increased about 10.7% in 2011, fueled by network upgrades and rampant hikes in programming costs — an interesting state of affairs considering Rogers and Bell own or control a substantial number of the programmers demanding higher payments.  Most of those increases were passed on to customers in the form of rate hikes.

Although Canadians are increasingly interested in streaming online video, virtually every major Internet Service Provider in the country has effectively prevented customers from dropping cable television service in favor of broadband-only access.  They manage it with usage caps and usage billing on their broadband products.  With streamed video accounting for a substantial drain on customers’ monthly usage allowances, Canadians are unlikely to cancel cable TV in favor of watching all of their favorite shows online.

In fact, the number of Canadian households that subscribed to a cable company’s basic television service actually increased by 2.8% in 2011 to reach 8.5 million.  Experts say the country’s transition to digital over the air television may account for some of that increase, but a few high broadband bills with overlimit fees for “excessive Internet use” can effectively drive online video fans back to traditional cable TV as well.

Satellite television in Canada remained flat,  with a virtually unchanged 2.9 million Canadians relying on Bell and Shaw satellite service for television entertainment.

But everyone is paying more to watch.

In 2011, cable companies paid $2.1 billion in wholesale fees to the pay and specialty services they distribute, an increase of 10.2% over the $1.9 billion paid the previous year. The fees paid by satellite companies rose by 2.8% in one year, going from $894.4 million to $919 million.

That leaves vertically and horizontally-integrated conglomerates like Bell in the perfect position to extract higher programming payments.  Those costs are passed down to Canadian consumers and blamed on “greedy programmers,” despite the fact those programmers are owned in part or outright by Bell.

A Rogers retail rental store

Rogers is also well-suited to remain a part of the Canadian entertainment experience.  The company owns cable systems, wireless phone networks, programmers, and even home video stores. However Stop the Cap! reader Alex notes Rogers has been closing a number of those video stores over the past few months.

“This gives customers one less choice for renting movies, basically forcing them to use Rogers On Demand instead,” writes Alex.

Rogers On Demand comes with a higher price, too.  In-store rentals from Rogers are priced at 2 for $9 or 3 for $15.  A recent look at Rogers’ video on demand website, Rogers Anyplace TV, shows most movie titles priced at $4.99 each.  With Rogers closing 40 percent of their retail rental outlets, movie fans have had fewer competitive choices for movie rentals.

One potential new contender coming to Canada – kiosk video rentals.  Although services like Redbox are now commonplace in the States, they are virtually unknown in the north.  Jim Gormley, former owner of Jumbo Video is back with Planet DVD.  With just 2% of Canadians renting movies from kiosks, Gormley believes there is plenty of room to grow, especially as Rogers scales back its video rental business.

Planet DVD has a pilot project running with supermarket chain Sobeys to place kiosks in front of nine store locations.  The first kiosk was erected in early March in front of a Sobeys store in Mississauga, Ont.

A new release at a Planet DVD kiosk is priced at $3 for a one-day rental.  That’s less than what most video stores charge, but more than double what Americans pay at a Redbox kiosk.

If you want better Canadian broadband with fewer tricks and traps and live in Ontario or Quebec: put the house up for sale, pack up your things, and head west.

Canada’s heavily metered and capped broadband is ubiquitous in the country’s two most-populated provinces where a convenient duopoly of Bell and Rogers in Ontario and Bell and Videotron in Quebec control the vast majority of the broadband market.  But cross west into Saskatchewan and things start to look a lot better.

Canadians telecommunications consultancy The Seaboard Group praised SaskTel, the provincial phone company, for refusing to slap usage caps on its customers.  SaskTel does not deliver the cheapest Internet access by any means, but the company is investing heavily in fiber optic upgrades to turn the page on aging copper wire infrastructure.  Stringing fiber through Regina, Saskatoon and beyond may seem counterintuitive to other providers.  Saskatchewan, one of Canada’s “prairie provinces,” is hardly packed with people.  With more than 20 million Canadians living in Ontario and Quebec, Saskatchewan gives its 1 million residents a lot of open space.  Sparser populations usually translate into higher costs per customer for upgrades, but SaskTel persists.

SaskTel has historically relied on traditional DSL and has competition in larger communities from Shaw Cable, western Canada’s largest cable operator.  Although SaskTel’s DSL delivers lower speeds than Shaw can provide, it does so with no usage limits.

Shaw’s decision to provide considerably more generous usage allowances has kept the pressure on SaskTel to upgrade its infrastructure to compete.

SaskTel CEO Ron Styles told the Leader-Post its fiber optic network will give cable a run for its money, and until then, it is satisfied undercutting cable pricing for broadband, delivering a far better experience than either Rogers or Bell provides eastern Canadians, Styles says.

Seaboard president Iain Grant found that what customers are willing to pay for service can also influence what prices providers charge.

“The price is more based on what you’re prepared to pay,” Grant said.

People in western Canada evidently are not willing to hand over as much money as their friends in Ontario and Quebec.

West of Saskatchewan lies Alberta and British Columbia — Telus territory.  Telus is western Canada’s largest phone company and also principally competes with Shaw Cable.

Shaw has forced Telus to back down on fueling enhanced revenue with usage caps of its own, and has been aggressively upgrading its network with additional fiber optics and DOCSIS 3 technology, forcing Telus to embark on its own upgrade effort.

Macleans reports western Canada’s more-competitive broadband market has been good for consumers, but has also exposed a difference in priorities for providers.

With Shaw breathing down its neck, Telus has committed to a $3 billion fiber optic network expansion in B.C., improved wireless coverage, and more IPTV service.  Macleans notes Telus is the only major telecom or cable company in Canada that hasn’t purchased a television asset, focusing instead on its core businesses of connecting customers.

In eastern Canada, Bell faces Rogers and Videotron.  Critics contend Bell sees no imminent threats there, and the phone giant is spending its money elsewhere, announcing a $3.4 billion acquisition of Astral Media — an entertainment company owning 24 specialty cable channels and pay-TV networks, including the Movie Network and HBO Canada.

Bell’s latest “investment” follows its 2010 $1.3 billion buyout of CTV and last year’s $1.32 billion co-purchase of Maple Leafs Sports and Entertainment (the other buyer was their ‘arch-competitor’ Rogers Communications).

While Telus spends money on upgrading its broadband and video services to customers, Bell is positioning itself to control 34% of Canada’s TV universe.  Bell is also the same company that advocated slapping nationwide usage-based pricing on Canadian broadband consumers to pay for the “network upgrades” it contends were needed to handle increasing demand.

Just a few weeks after announcing $2 rate increases on most tiers of the company’s broadband service, Rogers Communications has announced speed upgrades and tiny increases in usage allowances for certain customers:

• Express: download speeds will increase from up to 12Mbps to up to 18Mbps and data allowance will increase from 60GB to 70GB.
• Extreme: download speeds will increase from up to 24Mbps to up to 28Mbps and data allowance will increase from 100GB to 120GB.

These enhancements apply to customers utilizing Rogers DOCSIS 3.0 capabilities. Rogers will start rolling out the faster speeds to existing Express tier customers currently receiving download speeds of up to 12 Mbps starting January 26^th and will continue over the following weeks. New customers will experience faster speeds beginning February 21^st. All new and existing customers will benefit from higher data allowances starting March 8^th.

Rogers has played repeatedly with their usage allowances, particularly for its Extreme tier, which has seen increases and decreases over the past few years:

Rogers Extreme Tier Usage Cap History

• 2009: 95GB per month
• 2010: Reduced to 80GB per month (-15GB)
• 2011: Increased to 100GB per month (+20GB)
• 2012: Increased to 120GB per month (+20GB)

Rogers’ Express service gets just a 10GB monthly bump, making the speed upgrade less valuable because customers are restrained from using the service.

Rogers says the incremental upgrades are a result of Canadians using the Internet more than ever.

“Rogers customers are increasingly watching movies on Rogers on Demand Online, working from home and using multiple devices like tablets and laptops connected by Wi-Fi to the internet,” said John Boynton, executive vice-president and chief marketing officer at Rogers Communications. “The ways Canadians are using the internet are changing dramatically and we are constantly reviewing our plans and policies to ensure they deliver the best possible customer experience that lines up with evolving needs and usage patterns.”

Apparently those living in western Canada use the Internet even more, because Shaw Communications’ comparable broadband tiers are much more generous:

Shaw Communications Usage Allowances

• High Speed 10Mbps: 125GB per month
• High Speed 20Mbps: 200GB per month
• Broadband 50Mbps: 400GB per month

Ex-CEO Jim Shaw earns even more not working for the cable company his father founded.

The ex-CEO of Shaw Communications is a charter member of the 1% Club, raking in more than $25 million from a golden parachute retirement package cable customers are paying as part of their ever-increasing monthly cable bills.

Jim Shaw earned $1.2 million in 2011 from his duties as chief executive.  But when the 53-year old decided early retirement was right for him, the company that shares his name provided a generous $25.5 million parting gift.  That’s a golden parachute package equivalent to what more than 2,000 lower-middle class Canadians earn each year.

What makes Jim Shaw worth that much?  Company officials claim the departing CEO helped the company earn new revenue.  But Shaw subscribers know the recipe for higher revenue is easy to make — annual rate increases and overpriced products and services.

Shaw didn’t have much of a fight justifying his departing pay package.  Not with his father J.R. Shaw holding 79 percent of the cable company’s Class A voting stock.  The Shaw family has been especially generous with themselves in 2011.  Brother Brad pocketed $15.8 million this year for himself.

The Shaw Executive Money Party has grown so large, the company’s top six paid officers collectively walked away with compensation of $82.2 million in 2011, $1.5 million more than Shaw Communications earned in the entire fourth quarter of 2010.  Imagine one-quarter of your company’s earnings headed straight into the pockets of a half-dozen employees, often immediate family members of the CEO or company founder.

Even those sums are dwarfed by the $330 million the company has now set aside to guarantee executive pensions, even as Shaw’s lower level employees (and most of their customers) see their incomes continue to stagnate, if not outright decline.

That three Shaw family members collectively grabbed $58.6 million from the company accounts is not welcome news for shareholders.  Jim Shaw’s exit package in particular proved galling for some, particularly because he effectively sabotaged his own standing with image-damaging public comments and an abrasive management style.

“There was a lot of institutional backlash over the pension given to Jim on his departure because it was rather monstrous,” one pension fund adviser was reported as saying in the Edmonton Journal. “This is just another piece that will get everybody upset.”

Shareholders are also unimpressed with the value of their Class B Shaw stock, which has remained lackluster since 2006.

While top management earned big, Shaw has alienated customers with legendary call holding times that can extend for hours, annual rate increases for cable service, and less-than-impressive customer satisfaction scores.

Shaw is western Canada’s dominant cable operator.

(Courtesy: Glasbergen)

Shaw Cable customers in Langley and Aldergrove, B.C., waited as long as four hours on hold to speak to a customer service representative trying to learn when their cable and broadband service would be restored after vandals cut a fiber line.

Days later, hundreds of customers were still without service… and answers.

“When I called [Shaw], I was told there was a four-hour wait to talk to customer service,” area resident Candace Hopkins told CBC News.

That four hour hold time was hardly an isolated case.  Several CBC viewers reported similar experiences, and many simply gave up calling even though their cable service was out for days.

Shaw Cable suspects the vandals were would-be copper thieves, unhappy to discover their efforts would only net them fiber optic cables which have almost no resale value.  But customers suspect the cable cuts have not been a priority for Shaw, leaving customers in the dark about when service would be restored.

CBC News called Shaw customer service and only managed to get a recording, which said nothing about how large the problem was or when it would be fixed, saying only that some service was restored and crews were working on the rest.

Other calls to Shaw’s media relations department from CBC News have not been returned.

Shaw customers are not amused, invading the company’s Twitter account with repeated complaints. Other outages have left customers with similar experiences.  One customer on the Outer Gulf Islands told he’d be waiting up to four hours for help managed to leave his number for a call back.

“The kicker is that after about four hours we received a call from something approximating Shaw,” the customer explains. “I believe that it was a call center in India. To add insult to injury, the voice on the other end of the phone line told me that everything was fine with my line. And, it was. Service had been restored 10 minutes before the call back. When I tried to explain this and asked what the earlier service disruption was about, the voice on the line simply kept repeating that everything was fine on my line.”

Shaw’s hold times are infamous in western Canada.  It is not uncommon to wait at least an hour to speak to a customer service representative as we reported back in September.  Some customers find it quicker to drive to the nearest cable office to arrange for service calls or manage their accounts.  So far, Canadian regulators have done little to pressure Shaw into making improvements.

When service was restored, some customers were brave enough to call Shaw to request outage credits.  “A big mistake,” shares one of our readers.

“The automated voice said there was a two hour hold time and when I finally got through, I was told I couldn’t get a credit because I didn’t report the outage during the outage,” says Stop the Cap! reader Jules who shared this story over his restored Internet service in Aldergrove.

“They didn’t seem to have a good answer when I suggested how difficult that would have been since it took out my Shaw telephone line as well. I got my credit.”

Fiber optic cable spool

For the most populated provinces in Canada, questions about when fiber-to-the-home service will become a reality are easy to answer:  Never, indefinitely.

Some of Canada’s largest telecommunications providers have their minds made up — fiber isn’t for consumers, it’s for their backbone and business networks.  For citizens of Toronto, Calgary, Montreal, and Vancouver coping with bandwidth shortages, providers have a much better answer: pay more, use less Internet.

Fiber broadband projects in Canada are hard to find, because providers refuse to invest in broadband upgrades to deliver the kinds of speeds and capacity Canadians increasingly demand.  Instead, companies like Bell, Shaw, and Rogers continue to hand out pithy upload speeds, throttled downloads, and often stingy usage caps.  Much of the country still relies on basic DSL service from Bell or Telus, and the most-promoted broadband expansion project in the country — Bell’s Fibe, is phoney baloney because it relies on existing copper telephone wires to deliver the last mile of service to customers.

Much like in the United States, the move to replace outdated copper phone lines and coaxial cable in favor of near-limitless capacity fiber remains stalled in most areas.  The reasons are simple: lack of competition to drive providers to invest in upgrades and the unwillingness to spend $1000 per home to install fiber when a 100GB usage cap and slower speeds will suffice.

The Toronto Globe & Mail reports that while 30-50 percent of homes in South Korea and Japan have fiber broadband, only 18 percent of Americans and less than 2 percent of Canadians have access to the networks that routinely deliver 100Mbps affordable broadband without rationed broadband usage plans.

In fact, the biggest fiber projects underway in Canada are being built in unexpected places that run contrary to the conventional wisdom that suggest fiber installs only make sense in large, population-dense, urban areas.

Manitoba’s MTS plans to spend $125-million over the next five years to launch its fiber to the home service, FiON.  By the end of 2015, MTS expects to deploy fiber to about 120,000 homes in close to 20 Manitoba communities.  In Saskatchewan, SaskTel is investing $199 million in its network in 2011 and approximately $670 million in a seven-year Next Generation Broadband Access Program (2011 – 2017). This program will deploy Fiber to the Premises (FTTP) and upgrade the broadband network in the nine largest urban centers in the province – Saskatoon, Regina, Moose Jaw, Weyburn, Estevan, Swift Current, Yorkton, North Battleford and Prince Albert.

“Saskatchewan continues to be a growing and dynamic place,” Minister responsible for SaskTel Bill Boyd said. “The deployment of FTTP will create the bandwidth capacity to allow SaskTel to deploy exciting new next generation technologies to better serve the people of Saskatchewan.”

But the largest fiber project of all will serve the unlikely provinces of Atlantic Canada, among the most economically challenged in the country.  Bell Aliant is targeting its FibreOP fiber to the home network to over 600,000 homes by the end of next year.  On that network, Bell Aliant plans to sell speeds up to 170/30Mbps to start.

In comparison, residents in larger provinces are making due with 3-10Mbps DSL service from Bell or Telus, or expensive usage-limited, speed-throttled cable broadband service from companies like Rogers, Shaw, and Videotron.

Bell Canada is trying to convince its customers it has the fiber optic network they want.  Its Fibe Internet service sure sounds like fiber, but the product fails truth-in-advertising because it isn’t an all-fiber-network at all. It’s similar to AT&T’s U-verse — relying on fiber to the neighborhood, using existing copper phone wires to finish the job.  Technically, that isn’t much different from today’s cable systems, which also use fiber to reach into individual neighborhoods.  Traditional coaxial cable handles the signal for the rest of the journey into subscriber homes.

A half-fiber network can do better than none at all.  In Ontario, Bell sells Fibe Internet packages at speeds up to 25Mbps, but even those speeds cannot compare to what true fiber networks can deliver.

Globe & Mail readers seemed to understand today’s broadband realities in the barely competitive broadband market. One reader’s take:

“The problem in Canada (and elsewhere) preventing wide scale deployment of FTTH isn’t the technology, nor the cost. It’s a lack of political vision and will, coupled with incumbent service providers doing whatever they can to hold on to a dysfunctional model that serves their interests at the expense of consumers.”

Another:

“The problem with incumbents is they only think in 2-3 year terms. If they can’t make their money back in that period of time, they’re not interested. Thinking 20, heck even 10 years ahead is not in their vocabulary.”

Julia Chastin is old enough to know that life sometimes makes you wait, but three hours is ridiculous.

Chastin (her maiden name, to protect her privacy), is a customer of Shaw Cable in Fort Macleod, Alb.  Her Internet service went down last weekend when the neighbor’s overzealous application of a “weed whacker” went awry and damaged her cable connection.  Chastin called Shaw Cable to report the problem, and there began her life in call queue hell.

“Usually companies who make you wait will tell you if their lines are especially busy, which is fine because I can just set the telephone on the speakerphone and go about my business until someone answers, but this turned a phone call into an afternoon adventure,” Chastin says.

In total, it was two hours, fifty-three minutes before a human being finally came on the phone, but only briefly.

“I heard this fumbling sound like someone’s headset was coming off, some mumbling and laughter, and then the line disconnected,” Chastin reports.  ”I was furious.”

Chastin is not alone.

“Shaw’s hold times are legendary here in the west,” says Rob Kelvey, a Shaw customer near Vancouver.  ”You can easily wait on hold an hour or two before someone answers, and that is day or night.”

Kelvey reports Shaw teases customers with an option inviting customers to accept a call back from a Shaw representative instead of waiting on hold, but it doesn’t work.

“I have used this option at least three times in the past year or so and it has never worked once.”

The problem isn’t just noticed by customers.  A recent polite editorial in the Grand Forks (B.C.) Gazette called out Shaw’s ridiculous hold times and poor customer service:

There are probably many people out there who have had to call the cable company when a TV or Internet-related problem arises only to be put on hold and not just recently.

It is not unusual to be put in a phone queue, especially when it comes to customer service, but the sometimes extraordinarily long wait times can even test those with the greatest of patience.

“Three hours isn’t patience, it’s perseverance,” retorts Chastin.

Customer Service Scoreboard bottom-rated Shaw, based on several hundred responses from customers.  More than 300 were critical of Shaw; only 17 people shared positive experiences with the company’s representatives.   The website rated Shaw Cable a dismal 29 out of 200, putting them firmly in the “terrible” category.

“Sometimes it really is faster to walk to a local Shaw Cable office to report problems instead of calling them on the phone, an ironic fact for a telecommunications company,” says Kelvey.

Shaw officials will occasionally tweet apologies for extended hold times and suggest customers use their online chat customer support feature or their Facebook page for assistance.  But some customers found Shaw’s online chat had “hold times” as well, sometimes as long as 40 minutes.

“Fort Macleod doesn’t offer a lot of options for Internet access, so waiting for Shaw is unfortunately the best option, but when I finally did manage to get someone on the phone, they heard from me good and I received a $20 service credit as an olive branch, which I appreciated,” Chastin says.

“I’d appreciate more not having to wait my life away on hold for hours even more.”