(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.”

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.”

Canada’s transition to digital television was supposed to be a non-event for cable and satellite customers, because those providers will continue to service analog televisions for sometime to come.  But Shaw Communications found a way to squeeze a few more dollars out of some of their subscribers anyway.

While Canadian broadcasters were discontinuing analog over-the-air television, many Shaw Cable service areas were also dumping an increasing number of analog channels in favor of digital.  In Kamloops, B.C., Cheryl Whiting discovered that conversion was going to cost her plenty.  Although Shaw provides one digital set top box for free, each additional box rents for $2.95 per month, and Whiting will need four of them if she wants to continue watching cable stations above channel 13 throughout her home.

“I may as well sign my paycheque over to them,” Whiting told The Daily News.

Shaw’s ongoing “digital upgrade” is clearing away much of the analog cable dial to make room for additional digital television signals and faster broadband, but that transition comes at a price to customers who now need a set top box on most of their televisions.

Many customers were upgraded during the month of August, with most of the rest scheduled for conversion during September.

[flv width=”540″ height=”416″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Shaw Digital Network Upgrade – Analog Customers.flv[/flv]

Shaw tells customers it is moving all of their cable channels above “broadcast basic” to a digital platform, requiring customers to place digital set top boxes on all of their televisions.  (1 minute)

While Netflix has grown like wildfire across Canada, providing unlimited streamed video entertainment for $8 a month, a few cable operators at risk of premium channel cord-cutting have responded with their own movie streaming services, at least one that temporarily found itself the subject of controversy when it was introduced a few weeks ago.

Shaw Communications’ Movie Club is that cable company’s answer to Netflix — offering a flat rate streaming service available over broadband or through your Shaw set top cable box for $17 a month ($12 if you forgo HD movies).  For that, Shaw promises unlimited viewing, without any usage caps so long as you stream movies from your cable box and not from your home computer.

But is it worth it?

With the assistance of one of our readers in Calgary, we were able to give Shaw’s Movie Club a trial run.

Availability

Evidently, Shaw Movie Club works best if you live in Calgary or Edmonton, where Shaw has been testing their new “Gateway” system, which is a combination home video terminal/DVR designed to compete with phone company DVR boxes which can record 4-6 shows simultaneously and deliver recordings to multiple sets in the home.  A number of Shaw customers on less-advanced, older cable systems may find the service a lot less convenient to use.  Outside of urban Alberta and in British Columbia, we found instances where customers could request to view Shaw Movie Club titles, but they had to be watched on your cable set top box.  For now, the most aggressive marketing for the service seems to be in Calgary and Edmonton, perhaps for this reason.

The Selection

When we sampled the service, we found about 150 titles available for viewing — hardly a wide selection.  Although many popular, semi-recent movies were available for viewing, the selection was comparable to what one would find from one or two premium movie channels.  Existing premium subscribers may find more than enough to watch from Super Channel or Movie Central On Demand, which are included with your subscription to one or both networks.  In the States, HBO, Cinemax, and Showtime all offer their own virtual “on-demand” channels that let viewers select most of the titles shown on each respective network for instant, on-demand viewing.  Shaw Movie Club felt very much like one of these channels, based on the limited selection.

In comparison, Netflix does not make it easy to count the actual number of streamed movies they have on offer at any one time, but the selection was clearly more substantial on Netflix, with a much deeper catalog.  But Canadians are also punished by Netflix because the service does not yet have agreements in place with studios to stream the same titles to both American and Canadian audiences.  Americans have a much larger selection of titles to stream.  Shaw’s agreements with studios clearly emphasize more current titles, and there are titles available on Shaw’s service that are not available from Netflix.

Winner: Netflix – You have a better chance of finding something to watch on Netflix.

Loser: Shaw Movie Club – But the service may have access to movies you wish Netflix provided.

Shaw's biggest competitor

The Value

At up to $17 a month, Shaw Movie Club is expensive.  In fact, it’s a lot more expensive if you do not subscribe to Shaw’s cable television.  It’s required to sign up for the streaming service.  That seems counter-intuitive to provide video streaming but deny broadband-only customers the opportunity to buy, but not when you consider such services are designed to prevent cable-TV cord cutting, not enable it.  Shaw charges nearly $40 in Alberta for basic cable service, so that’s a steep entry fee to pay before handing over another $12-17 just to stream movies.

For those uncomfortable video streaming on home computers, Shaw’s set top box solution lets you watch shows on-demand directly on your television.

Shaw initially found itself mired in controversy when it appeared they would exempt their video streaming service from their own usage caps — a clear anti-competitive move against Netflix, which does count against your cap.  But Shaw quickly clarified their position to state only set top box viewing was exempt from their caps.  We’re not certain exactly what distinction Shaw is trying to make beyond the political, because data is data — it all arrives on the same cable.  Shaw would argue their video may travel over their “television” bandwidth when delivered to set top boxes and their broadband network when delivered over the Internet.  But Time Warner Cable has shown it can deliver video over its Apple iPad app to cable subscribers over Time Warner’s internal network, which means it costs next to nothing to provide.  We suspect there is nothing technically precluding Shaw from exempting all of its Movie Club viewing from usage caps, beyond the political implications of doing so.

Winner: Netflix – $7.99 a month is an afterthought when you consider how much you can watch.

Loser: Shaw Movie Club – Up to $17 a month is a very steep price to pay for fewer than 200 movie titles to watch.

Video Quality

Both services delivered high quality video, even over a remote connection we used to sample Shaw Movie Club.  Shaw’s HD streaming performed with absolutely no technical flaws, evidence they are paying careful attention to deliver video from networks as close to their customers as possible.  Shaw’s HD streaming was often better than Netflix’s online streaming, but Netflix’s network consumes a lot less bandwidth, an important distinction if you have a large family piling on your broadband connection at the same time.  Shaw’s video is a bandwidth piggy, and will eat into your usage allowance fast if you use it over the Internet.

We recommend watching Shaw’s service over your existing set top box whenever possible.  It’s convenient and won’t count against your usage allowance.

A Tie: Netflix and Shaw Movie Club both deliver excellent quality video with no technical flaws experienced.  Shaw Movie Club has a larger selection of HD movies, but that is tempered by the fact watching them will rapidly erode your usage allowance if watching online.