What can/should I do?

**saberon** · 07-22-2012, 12:28 PM

This is a real mess and I'll try to keep it as short as I can.

My mother has had an account through Telus for close to 2 years now. We did an early upgrade to a 4S back in March and things were going well.

Starting in June her 3G speeds (we live in a small town with 1 tower, but speeds have always been 3+Mbps) have absolutely tanked. In the morning/late at night she can get 0.7Mbps max, and during the day it either refuses to work or I can benchmark 0.02Mbps (yes you read that right).

I'm her son and I fix computers in my town. I get daily calls from Bell/Telus smartphone users who have no/dialup speed 3G service so I know for a fact it's not her 4 month old iPhone.

Here's the weird thing, theres a fairly large city (80,000) about 20 min away that we frequent, and the speeds are fantastic there at 8Mbps usually. But every other little small town around this main city has the same symptoms as my town's tower. I've been to all these other little towns prior to June without issue but now they ALL either refuse to work or I get less than 0.1Mbps download.

I've called Telus 5 times and they basically said they can't help. I complained to the CCTS and a Telus rep called me back the next day saying basically they can't do anything/let me out of the contract. He offered free VVmail for 3 years as compensation....yeah right!! He also said we can't do anything because my mom used 800MB of data last month..but that's because she went nuts with data everytime we went to the 80,000+ population city because it's the only time her data works.

I'm so frustrated with Telus right now, her voice/texting works but 3G is 99% non-existent. It's $400+ to cancel and I cant feasibly do it.

Anyone have any thoughts/suggestions? (My iPhone is Rogers and is fantastic for speeds everywhere I go, my mother had 0 problems until about June)

**xtachx** · 07-22-2012, 02:11 PM

Pay $400, get phone unlocked and try Rogers. Also phones like HTC Amaze, Galaxy S3 etc will give you better data speeds due to DC-HSPA antennas in the phones.

But really you probably have to wait till LTE comes to your city.

**DennyCrane** · 07-22-2012, 02:13 PM

Wirelessly posted (BlackBerry Bold 9900: Mozilla/5.0 (BlackBerry; U; BlackBerry 9900; en) AppleWebKit/534.11+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.1.0.391 Mobile Safari/534.11+)

Yeah it sure sounds like some people are hogging all the bandwidth. Maybe they need to allocate more to your area. I'm not quite sure how that works. How's the speed in off-peak hours like at 3am?

I would get a bunch of people in your town to start calling in and logging tickets.

**saberon** · 07-22-2012, 02:23 PM

I should also mentioned for the first time ever, I called my mother the other day and got an "All circuits are busy" message which would again prove the theory of overloaded tower. I tell everyone that calls me to phone Telus/Bell and complain but I get the feeling nobody really will seeing as they know I know there's a problem...

Will try the 3AM data test tonight.

edit: Should mention too that her upload is always great at 2+Mbps.

**jattdesi** · 07-22-2012, 03:19 PM

Overall all Telus & Bell's Shared HSPA + network is way better & bigger then Rogers Network but it isn't perfect so here is the solution to your problem since you say paying a cancellation fee of $400 is out of the question.

Telus will unlock your iPhone 4s for $50 & you can probably easily sell that unlocked iPhone for $450 to $500. Once it's sold use that to pay off the ETF and sign up with a subsidized Device with Rogers.

All though I personally never have or never will sign a contract for a cell phone subsidy even with the new cancellation policy of Rogers & Telus.

Sent from Telus's HTC Amaze 4G running on Shared HSPA+ Network

**saberon** · 07-27-2012, 08:51 AM

Originally Posted by shushwap

^^^ Good idea

Okay here's a bit of an update in case anyone is wondering.

Eventually settled with Telus/CCTS instead of canceling, my mother's phone is used for business and she just couldn't be bothered of jumping through the hoops of switching to Rogers (selling phone, canceling, porting over etc etc) She got a cheaper plan with everything in her current plan plus more.

The slow speeds are still strange to me. I drove out to within feet of the cell tower and was getting 8+Mbps speeds. I drove literally down the road for about 2 minutes with a completely clear line of sight and they tanked back to around 0.2Mbps...it's almost like the range is screwed up...

Anyhow, thanks all for the suggestions. =)

**drfoo** · 07-30-2012, 09:44 AM

I have the exact same problem in AB, i believe they're set up for a 600 person town, but there's 1200 including oilfield workers, and every one of them has iphones and aircards. The speeds are terrible, worse than dialup for much of the day everyday. Travel to the next tower over, they're fine. In addition the phone service for HSPA has literally went down for 1-2 days 3 different times this year alone. Like literally the CDMA phones work fine but everyone else can't make calls at all. It's brutal.
Telus's response "we'll look into it" and it never gets better. Probably half the people there are platinum customers, I tried to set up a trouble ticket to get everyone to reference when they phone in, maybe that's the only way is to send 500 complaints. Bell I imagine is exactly the same and Rogers has terrible service in rural Alberta, so you're stuck with Telus.

**Dylan Poulson** · 07-30-2012, 11:37 PM

Originally Posted by drfoo

I have the exact same problem in AB, i believe they're set up for a 600 person town, but there's 1200 including oilfield workers, and every one of them has iphones and aircards. The speeds are terrible, worse than dialup for much of the day everyday. Travel to the next tower over, they're fine. In addition the phone service for HSPA has literally went down for 1-2 days 3 different times this year alone. Like literally the CDMA phones work fine but everyone else can't make calls at all. It's brutal.
Telus's response "we'll look into it" and it never gets better. Probably half the people there are platinum customers, I tried to set up a trouble ticket to get everyone to reference when they phone in, maybe that's the only way is to send 500 complaints. Bell I imagine is exactly the same and Rogers has terrible service in rural Alberta, so you're stuck with Telus.

Try Drumheller Alberta speeds. Max I've ever gotten is 1 Mbps and during the day the two towers. (850 Mhz and only single cell HSPA+) Yes we're still on 21 Mbps speeds here. There is at least 15 000 people on the two towers combined. Your lucky to get a call even a text. Most of the people I know all are getting iPhones or Blackberries as they can connect via wifi and still use BBM or iMessage. Telus has told me the towers are going to be outfitted with LTE and DC-HSPA+ which will make things faster. Wouldn't that make things even slower with CDMA 1X and EVDO, HSPA+ and LTE all using bandwidth. Even the tower positioning leaves me with no service in the biggest tourist places (Big dinosaur, inside the Royal Tyrrell Museum)

There might not be millions of people but Telus shouldn't leave all the smaller towns out to dry with shotty service.

**Que_Ball** · 07-31-2012, 11:07 AM

I was in Drumheller recently and the speeds are brutal, the coverage at the museum was practically useless. (i'm convinced half the people who walk up to the top of the hill across from the entrance were just trying to check their messages.)
If you drive about 20 minutes in any direction away from the valley it's fine again. That's definitely a case of having too many people on a single tower.

But Telus knows about that one at least. They released a press release indicating they were going to spend $450,000 doing upgrades in Drumheller later this year. So in that specific case it's already going to be fixed you just have to wait for a few months.
http://about.telus.com/community/eng...heller-in-2012

**Dylan Poulson** · 07-31-2012, 11:22 AM

Originally Posted by Que_Ball

I was in Drumheller recently and the speeds are brutal, the coverage at the museum was practically useless. (i'm convinced half the people who walk up to the top of the hill across from the entrance were just trying to check their messages.)
If you drive about 20 minutes in any direction away from the valley it's fine again. That's definitely a case of having too many people on a single tower.

But Telus knows about that one at least. They released a press release indicating they were going to spend $450,000 doing upgrades in Drumheller later this year. So in that specific case it's already going to be fixed you just have to wait for a few months.
http://about.telus.com/community/eng...heller-in-2012

What could we expect Telus to be putting 450 000 of upgrades into?

**Que_Ball** · 07-31-2012, 11:46 AM

My guess, they will add 1900Mhz to the existing tower in town to give a capacity boost to the existing coverage and add another tower/antenna somewhere near the museum or possibly right on their roof.

**Dylan Poulson** · 07-31-2012, 11:48 AM

Originally Posted by Que_Ball

My guess, they will add 1900Mhz to the existing tower in town to give a capacity boost to the existing coverage and add another tower/antenna somewhere near the museum or possibly right on their roof.

It would be even better if they added the tower where it could benefit the whole town as well. But thanks! Unfortunate that I'm moving in 4 days.