Telus It Ain’t So
October 9th, 2007 by Alex RobarEvery day, at least once per day, Ev gets a call to her cell phone from a fax machine. Obviously a cell phone isn’t going to pick up a fax, and as such these calls are particularly annoying. “No problem”, you might think, “Just call Telus and have them block the number from calling you.” Ah yes, a basic feature that every carrier should provide without issue, right? Right… I’ve got news on this front. Telus doesn’t have the ability to block inbound calls. They don’t have an abuse department to deal with such problematic calls either. Want to complain? Too bad, there’s no telephone complaints department.
Listen up Telus: If I can implement a feature on my home telephony server that runs on free software, you better damn well be able to replicate those features on your multi-billion dollar infrastructure. Blacklisting a number is a simple, basic feature that should pose no problem. When your only answer to “how do I stop these harassing calls?” is “Uhh… Change your phone number.”, you are doing something wrong.
I love the fact that we’ve got open source telephony software and carriers like Iristel or Unlimitel that let us kick the major carriers in the family jewels… But there’s nothing like that for the cellular market. The closest we’ve got is wifi phones. These are pretty great, but the lack of wifi coverage kills widespread adoption of such technologies. Perhaps when we see the big WiMAX blimps floating overhead we’ll know it’s a sign of the death of the cell phone carrier?
Posted in Life, Robar's Rant, VoIP |
March 23rd, 2008 at 1:11 am
Telus has done the ultimate to me and my wife, actually allowed a corporate company to access my persoanl cell phone account and make changes to my contract without my consent. I have never been notified of this act and never thought Telus would do this to a contract. Yes, I have a contract with them and they allowed access to my personal account, this means information and all. My phone number was taken from me, I bought phones and such at the time of the contract. The phone number was mine and I had purchased another contract at the same time for my wife.
March 23rd, 2008 at 1:51 am
Re: #1 - D Kuzsminski:
Wow! That sounds like a matter for the courts my friend. The phone number you might not be able to do much about (since Telus will own the number unless you request a port), but sharing of personal information is a major privacy violation. I hope Telus is offering you gold-plated cell phones and free service to make up for it!
That all said, I can’t help but notice you posted from a telus.net e-mail account on a Telus BC IP address. If I were you, I’d have moved all of my services off of Telus immediately! Although I don’t know your situation, this might not be possible.
May 7th, 2008 at 9:12 pm
my first comment got erased because I didn’t put my email. grrrrrrrr wordpress! anyway my telus phone has a feature where it blocks all incoming numbers excepting those in my contacts list. I got some weirdo calls and decided to try it–it worked! I have a pretty old phone ….the razorv3 or whatnot…:@
May 7th, 2008 at 10:03 pm
Re: #3 - em
See now, even if the reps knew THAT I would have been happy.The story got even worse though, with Telus sending Ev to their fraud department and eventually affecting her credit. To keep her as a customer they gave her a free BlackBerry, plus the most ridiculous plan I’ve ever heard of (it’s like unlimited everything except long distance for $60/month).