Shaw Cable

Location: Alberta, Red Deer
Industry: Telecom
Company: Shaw Cable

I recently relocated from Calgary to Red Deer (July 1st.) and in mid June I contacted Shaw Cable to make arrangements to have my service changed. Firstly, they kept telling me the address I was moving to was non-existant. I called them in Calgary and Edmonton and got the same result. I finally contacted the previous home owner in Vancouver and got the account name. (It was in the name of the previous owner's son) I called Shaw again and the person at the other end thought it was hilarious...they had been looking for a street named Englandway instead of England Way. (Ho-ho, Ha-ha).

That alone demonstrates the level of competence of their personnel. They assured me, however, that evrything would be ready for the first of the month. I called the next day to verify this assurance. Yep...no problem! Everything was in order. Come July 1st. and no service. Call them again and they had no record of any installation at this address and no work order had been generated. They arrived on the 5th. and proceeded with the installation. At that time I was told they would have to change my modem as it was outdated. I enquired as to whether the new modem would allow me to connect my Vonage router. After I got the big sales pitch about how I should be using Shaw's VOIP, which I refused (It was at least twice the cost with half the services), I was assured there would be no problem with the new modem. LIE!!! The new modem did not have a separate jack for the router as did my old modem and when I connected the cable through the Vonage router my internet connection went dead. I contacted Shaw and was told it was Vonage's problem??? I contacted Vonage and spent nearly an hour on the phone trying to get it to work. No luck, and as Vonage explained, this is the reason the VOIP providers have the ISPs before the Canadian Telecommunications Board. I purchased a D-Link router and tried it. Again nearly an hour on the phone with D-Link and it finally boiled down to the fact Shaw's setup would not let me through unless I changed all my port settings. (Shaw, of course denies they are doing anything to interfere with third party VOIP providers.) I called Shaw and told them I wanted my dual jack modem back. I was basically told to suck eggs. If I wanted my old modem I would have to contact the Shaw salvage depot in Edmonton, give them the modem serial number and hope they could find it. I have tried going wireless but there is no signal in my area. I tried Telus, only to find out, after the fact, that they are not compatible with Vista. (That's a whole other story) So, I had to give up the best phone service I ever had while these thugs tell me that it is not their problem that a system that worked like a dream in Calgary won't work in Red Deer. (Must be the internet fairies playing games.) I will, however, keep checking for new wireless providers and, as soon as there is one that I can connect to, Shaw will be history.