Strikes are bad news for Carriers and Customers

If you have live in Ontario, Canada right now and have had any dealings with your Telecom (either a request for new service or a repair issue) you may have noticed things are not what they ought to be.

Entourage, Bell's outsourced technicians for small business and residential services, have been in a labour dispute for a while now and the backlog is really causing havoc as regular Bell techs and managers try to cope.

And coping well - they are not. Long install times - 7 weeks for a basic business line (with 2x week complaints and escalations) and 30 days for repair of noisy lines seem to be the norm.

The issue here is that Bell, after having ditched their employees and leaving them little choice but to take an offer with Entourage for less money and benefits, is now trying to buy back the lower cost company. Looks good for Bell. Looks like sour milk for the techs.

See what competition does? Apparently we all wanted cheap LD rates and that is what started this. So now we have cheap LD rates and poor service and grumpy phone employees. What is worse?

Can we compare CD quality music to MP3's here? We had great sound with CD's - but now we want cheap (or free) music and are willing to sacrifice quality. OK for the car, but not my cup of tea.

I'm not sure we made progress on this front or the Telecom front. What are your comments?