After nearly 10 years of hand-wringing, it appears that the Pontiac will finally get the redundant phone line that local leaders have been calling for.
Welcome to 1999.
After years of service interruptions, Bell announced that it will finally pony up the cash – $2 million – to install a second phone line to the Pontiac, which will provide a fail-safe should the main line be severed.
In the past, when the phone line has been cut in one place in the Pontiac, the entire region goes dark. This means that people who need to get a hold of emergency services won’t even hear a dial tone when they pick up the phone.
In 2018, this is unacceptable.
This battle with one of the country’s largest companies – one that has a monopoly in the county to boot – has been raging for years.
After suffering through several disruptions, the MRC Pontiac council of mayors filed a complaint with the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) after a 2011 letter to Bell asking for more information about the outages went unanswered.
The MRC filed another complaint with the CRTC after yet another outage in July of 2014 laid bare the fact that nothing had been done.
The battle with Bell goes all the way back to a 2008 fire in Luskville that burned so hot it cut the phone line.
At the time, Bell said the estimated $750,000 cost was too much.
Now they’re spending $2 million to complete a project that would have cost less than half of that had they done it 10 years ago.
Weren’t businesses – especially ones that are among the most profitable in the country – supposed to be the ones who make smart decisions with their money?
So, the Pontiac finally gets the land line it’s needed for more than a decade and it only cost Bell an additional $1.25 million than if it had acted on the demands of local residents back in 2008.
Good financial management, that.
Bell has told Pontiac residents that adding a redundant phone line would be a “huge capital investment” and it was unfeasible.
Sorry?
Bell is in the business of providing phone services to customers. On a regular basis, that phone service simply stopped working.
Which means that Bell was not providing the service that thousands of people in this region pay a premium for.
And it’s not like Bell is providing some luxury. This is basic stuff.
People need phone lines to call, say, the fire department if their house is on fire. But Bell has been saying for a decade that it’s too expensive to provide this kind of reliable service.
To make matters worse, Bell is pretty much the only game in town. You don’t want to get phone service with Bell? Ok, no phone service for you.
When a government-sanctioned monopoly is allowed to behave like this, it’s no wonder that telecommunications companies rank amongst the lowest when it comes to consumer trust.
There is no incentive to improve. Or even provide adequate services.
To top it all off, if the phone line is cut, it’s not like it is in the city where people can simply pull out their cell phones and make a call.
Even at a place like the MRC offices in Campbell’s Bay – not exactly the middle of nowhere – cell service can be spotty.
Imagine being in the middle of the bush and your only lifeline to the outside world is suddenly nonexistent.
It’s about time Bell got its act together and brings us into the 21st century.
Better late than never.
Chris Lowrey
