Tisdale - Saturday, February 2, 2013
by:Timothy W. Shire
At the end of this past summer we switched over from Tisdale’s cable supplier, Access, to SaskTel because we wanted to get local television channels in HD so we signed up for Max. As it turned out we are paying a very high price for those high definition channels. With in days of switching over I discovered that the internet service with Sasktel was completely unreliable.
It would seem okay then suddenly drop to nothing, it was simply not up to the task of posting Ensign each week so I immediately contacted Access and we returned to them for internet service. This cost us $48 a month. I called up SaskTel and asked them to drop our internet service and they told us that we couldn’t do that, in Tisdale Max included the internet and that was simply that.
Well, I wasn’t to happy with the telephone company for that bit of misadventure and what seemed to me as clearly misleading advertising. But, we have kept on paying our bills which after a few months rose sharply.
SaskTel’s Max promotion included just about everything at first then after the demo period we kept on getting this deluxe service even though when we signed up I very specifically identified what we wanted and did not want. SaskTel’s underhanded and downright misrepresentation of their service was to give you everything in the promo then you had to renegotiate your service at the end of the demonstration time no matter what was said or agreed upon when signing up.
This resulted in some nasty telephone conversations between me and the Sasktel people, who in my opinion are just a bunch of thieves. What you read on their web site or hear from their representatives is not reflected in what you will see on your bill. If you don’t complain they will just leep on stealing from you month after month after month.
At Thanksgiving I decided that it was foolish not to make use of the internet service from SaskTel since I had to pay for it even though I didn’t want it and my sons set things up so that a laptop would access SaskTel while the other computers and the iPad worked off the completely reliable and higher speed Access service.
Just over a week ago I discovered that the SaskTel connection was just not functioning. I connected with their online help and a technician tested our line and told me that the line was working perfectly but some device in our system was using half of the download bandwidth. Since only the laptop was in play and it was not able to operate on the dead SaskTel connection it sounded really suspicious to me. The technician told me I must have some malware involved and that is causing the trouble. When I asked for some assistance with that issue he declined and said they do not support devices.
I ran some tests and my system seemed fine but I was determined to track down the problem and a technician from another jurisdiction with some very sophisticated online tools took over my computer and was able to say definitively that no malware was present but he did figure out what SaskTel was doing and has always been doing since I connected to their service.
Here is what SaskTel does and if you are one of their customers this is what to watch out for. The average top capability of SaskTel’s service to me is about 5.5 megabytes per second. However, if you go above that and say get 6.4 the SaskTel system shuts down service. If no demand comes from you for a minute or so it will restore service but if you continue to be connected attempting to make that download of data the system stays shut down. SaskTel is completely aware that their system does this but they do not tell you. It is not mentioned on their web site and their people will tell you that you have “unlimited” download capability. That is simply a bare faced lie. If you exceed their upper limit on your service the system collapses.
My expert reset some of the software on my computer by choking the download speed to 4.5 so it can not exceed that upper limit and since then the SaskTel service works much of the time. It is not a solid reliable service but it sort of works. I would not try to use NetFlix on the SaskTel system. After all that would be a competitor to their Max and thus the throttling of the access speeds.
If you have had some similar adventures with service provides bending the truth send them along to me, I would like to hear about it.