When he noticed his high-speed Internet connection slowing down to a crawl last October, David Shearman called tech support.
Bell Sympatico said there was nothing wrong. He persisted; Bell checked his phone lines, and pronounced them fine.
So Mr. Shearman, a United Church minister with a charge in Midwestern Ontario, did what a growing number of other bedeviled broadband users do: he taught himself all about high-speed service. He learned how to test his connection, how service providers control speeds, how they authenticate users on their systems, and how they cache and compress data to maintain speeds.
He joined activist groups. He also contacted GlobeTechnology.com, which in turn called Sympatico to find out more about his claims. The company admitted there was, indeed, a problem, and that in fact they had neglected to tell their tech support people about it. The problem was fixed almost immediately.
But by then Mr. Shearman had learned a lot about broadband. He is now part of a still small but ever-growing network of broadband users who have thrown down the gauntlet with Internet service providers, whose attitude toward customers - shown mostly through limited technical support - has often been cavalier.
But Canadian high-speed Internet service providers are facing challenges from more than irate customers these days. The industry, in fact, is in crisis, and by the time everything shakes out, broadband as we know it may be dramatically changed.
High-speed history
On the surface, these appear to be heady times for high-speed Internet access providers. Close to 30 per cent of Canadians have it - a high proportion compared to the United States, where only 14 per cent of the population is high-wired.
And Canadians continue to snap it up. In the fourth quarter of 2001, for instance, Bell Canada added 132,000 customers to its Sympatico digital subscriber line (DSL) service.
But all this has come at a cost.
The growing number of Canadians with broadband is at least partly the result of a price war among Canada's biggest high-speed suppliers that started in August 2001. While monthly fees remained around the $45 mark (including rental of the modem), Rogers Communications of Toronto began to slash introductory fees to attract more customers.
It was a move copied almost instantly by Montreal-based Bell Canada's Sympatico service, Cogeco Cable Inc. of Burlington, Ont., and Montreal's Videotron Communications. A similar blood-letting feud started in the West between Telus Corp. and Calgary-based Shaw Communications Inc.
Then in September, several high-flying providers hit unexpected turbulence when ExciteAtHome, the California-based Internet high-speed giant that ran the backbone for their Canadian services, declared bankruptcy. Shaw and Cogeco, two of Excite's three Canadian partners, bailed out and set up their own Internet access services.
In Ontario, Rogers (the third partner) held back, believing its access to Excite's services would remain secure since Excite had agreed to sell all its assets to AT&T, which holds large investments in Rogers. But by late October AT&T's purchase of Excite had collapsed. Rogers found itself forced to move quickly to a new network, or lose its 470,000 subscribers.
Rogers' dilemma sparked further changes in the industry. While Rogers was hurrying its customers to change their e-mail addresses from @home.com to @rogers.com, the company took the opportunity to change the way users' computers were authenticated on-line, the way e-mail is handled, and some elements of the terms of agreement (the contract that governs the relationship between the carrier and its customers). The company sent sharp letters to subscribers running servers on-line, telling them they were violating the user agreement. And in mid-February, Rogers announced a new subscriber plan called Rogers Lite, which offers lower connection speeds for a reduced rate.
Sympatico, Rogers' main competitor in Ontario and portions of New Brunswick and Newfoundland, was watching all this carefully. Sympatico raised the promotional and permanent prices for its digital subscriber line service (DSL) by $5 a month. Now it is dropping broad hints that it will roll out new levels of service, called "tiered accounts," and tinker with its own customer agreement.
The ugly economics of war
The bottom line is that the price war has left the broadband providers with a business that is losing money.
The high-speed carriers have been charging their customers a rate calculated on the surfing habits of average Internet users in 1995 top 1997, habits that have dramatically changed in the intervening years as technologies such as streaming video and peer-to-peer file sharing emerged. Combined with a flat-lining economy, the carriers found themselves unable to recoup their costs in supplying broadband access to their residential customers.
As one Sympatico executive said, "The economics of it are very ugly."
But almost any move to rectify the situation has been met with increasingly vocal opposition, some of it better informed about broadband than the ISP executives who must now make some tough business decisions. High-speed access is no longer a mystery product being marketed to ignorant customers, as people like Mr. Shearman have demonstrated.
The battle with customers may turn out to be more heated than the fight between competing ISPs.
In part two of globetechnology.com's series, 'Users or Abusers?,' Jack Kapica looks at the short-circuit occurring between Internet service providers and their customers, and what it could mean for the future of high-speed access.