Tbaytel denies claim it favours city customers

The chair of the local services board in Rossport says Tbaytel customers in his community, about 200 km east of Thunder Bay, have been unable to connect to the internet since Oct. 26.

Joe Campbell said the rocket hub service, which provides high speed internet access over a wireless network, will no longer support simple tasks such as online banking or web browsing. 

• TBaytel's LTE upgrade will provide faster data connections
• Murillo residents petition Tbaytel for high-speed internet

"They're telling us, 'you're small, we get to you when we can, we get to our Thunder Bay customers first," Campbell said of the response from Tbaytel. "We still signed up for their service. I still had to buy a hub and sign a contract with them and now the service they were providing is not there anymore."

But the manager of communications for Tbaytel said every customer is treated equally and the "degradation of service in Rossport" is a "critical issue."

"Just the sheer vastness of our region does create some challenges for us, but at the end of the day it's not about one customer being more important than another," Katie Crowe said.

Everybody got a different answer

Campbell said his frustration stems from the inconsistency of answers people in Rossport are getting when they ask about the problem.

"If they would tell us the tower blew up, or something like that, and it's going to be a month before you get it back then fine, everybody would know the same answer," Campbell said. "But everybody got a different answer from them."

Crowe said she's not entirely surprised by the range of responses to calls from Rossport.

"It's not that we have alarms and things that tell us exactly what is going on, on our entire network, all of the time," she said. "So when customers start to tell us there are things going on...there are so many possible root causes, so until we've really narrowed it down and gotten it out to all of our staff, there could be some conjecture."

Tbaytel is still diagnosing the problem in Rossport. Crowe said it has been narrowed down to two possible causes: either interference in the area, or trouble with the bandwidth. 

Until the diagnosis is clear, Crowe said, it's impossible to say when the problem will be fixed.

Campbell said the only other option for internet services in Rossport is dial-up or satellite, which requires a dish to be installed.