A member (I will call her Mary) called me to tell me that Telus is asking something very odd. She still has a landline that is connected via copper lines, and she does not want a digital one because she has a husband with health issues. She is aware that digital phones have batteries with limited power and she does not have a cell phone. This means when a prolonged outage occurs, she would have no phone to call in the case of an emergency. (As an example, she had a 2 day outage very recently.)

Telus’s representatives have come to Mary’s home and phoned her multiple times telling her she must allow them to enter her home to lay fiber optic cable “to and into her home”. She asked many questions but felt the answers made no sense. She has phone and internet with Telus, and is happy with the wired modem as well as her landline. In response to her consistent refusals, Telus’s rep told her that if she did not allow someone into her home to lay the cable, she would have her phone disconnected. Telus told her a “technician” would come to her home next week, giving her a date and time.

Mary made it clear she did not want a stranger in her home and did not want any changes made to her service. She tried to cancel the appointment but Telus refused. She spoke with several people and each one had slightly different ways of badgering her and threatened loss of her phone. Finally she was able to reach a Telus person in Montreal. After hearing her story, he told her he suspected that all of the people she had been dealing with were sales reps, not Telus employees, who were hired as part of the “free fiber optic cable” offer. This offer involves putting boxes on outside of homes as they bring FOC into neighbourhoods. This is the precursor of installing microcells which need the fiber optic cable to operate.  The Telus man didn’t seem to understand why a technician would need to go into her home. Neither did he understand the threat to cut off her phone — he emphasized Telus would not do this.

After several attempts, he was able to cancel the appointment — but he had trouble doing it, too.

(click on photo to enlarge)

Fortunately, Mary remembered my experience with Telus that I shared in an update 2-3 years ago. Telus has hired sales reps to get people to agree to accept “free fiber optic cable” and to put a box on the outside of homes. Who knows if they in fact do bring fiber optic cable to the home. My experience is not unique, Other people have told me of very aggressive behavior by people who say they work for Telus. One said that people kept coming to her home and each time she said she was not interested and asked them to get off her property. The last time 3 people came and were quite intimidating.

But this is the first time anyone had told me that these people are demanding that they be allowed to come into a home. There is no reason for this — they are not putting fiber optic cable into home. If my experience is any example, the reason would be to replace the landline phone with a digital box without permission, and removing the wired modem, replacing it with a wireless one. This is unconscionable — but it happened to me.

Has anyone else had a similar experience? If so, I would like to know. Perhaps if there are enough, the Ombudsperson or the CRTC might take action.  Email me at citizensforsafertech@shaw.ca with “Telus” on the subject line.

,Sharon Noble, Director, Coalition to Stop Smart Meters

“The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.”
― Albert Einstein