Please read the updates below at the end of this article, thanks.

Telus is a supplier of mobile, internet, telephony and cable TV services here in Canada. After some issues with Shaw, we decided to move our internet and TV services to Telus.

Why Did We Cancel Shaw

I will cover this in a later post reviewing overall customer service experiences during 2020. We have been with Shaw for many years but noticed their service hasn’t been so good lately so we decided to go with Telus.

Everybody complains about the cable company they are with so it’s tough to get a full and honest review of them as different people have different experiences. Initially, we had a great experience with Shaw but in the past 3 years, it was becoming an overhead to retain their services.

Telus laid fibre optic cables in our area which everyone told me was very much a more stable infrastructure.

Why Didn’t We Move to Telus Earlier?

We could have moved to Telus about a year ago in the initial wave of locals moving to them.

The reason we didn’t was due to their hard sales approach, the company outsourced this sales function to another company who I felt was pressing us too much without the information I needed to know to warrant the move. So, we just left it until now.

The Move

I wanted to wait and see what their Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales included, and we did find a very tempting bargain that, in the initial 2 years of the contract, would in fact be cheaper than Shaw. Obviously, the charge will go up in 2 years’ time but we can review what our requirements are in the meantime.

The offer was only good online but their website wasn’t cooperating in order to make the transaction happen. So, we started to get frustrated and for a short while almost didn’t take it any future. We phoned them up and said they would honour the deal online. When adding a service they go through another credit check. Because we are already a mobility customer we got a discount on top of the Black Friday deal.

The Installation

This went very well and the engineer that came to our home was quick and thorough in providing us with the training necessary.

We got two-wire connections, one for the TV and the other for my computer. For my computer, this provided me with a 990 Mbps download and upload speed. All I need do is turn my wifi on when I print and airdrop. I found the connection with Shaw was unpredictable, 300 Mbps would go down to 60 or 90 which was tough when trying to hold meetings online over Skype or Zoom. Since I’m not using the wifi bandwidth other devices would have a better connection. The Wifi speed is around 600 Mbps Upload and Download.

Rather than a desk modem, the Telus device sits in a closet where the wire comes into the home. This is so much more convenient than taking up room on my desk, so much better.

Post Installation

The only problem I experienced was not being able to send jobs to my printer through wifi, I have no idea why that happened but I managed to resolve it in a couple of days.

The internet is very stable, no mass fluctuations like Shaw. Still around 990+ Mbps on wire and 600+ Mbps via Wifi upload/download.

The TV quality is so much clearer and more stable than Shaw. Over Shaw we had quite a few visual and audio difficulties that were so annoying, haven’t seen this yet over Telus. We also have access to more channels including overseas news. No problems with Netflix as we had through Shaw.

What We Are Enjoying About Telus

Some quick bullet points detailing what I like about the service:

  • Stability
  • Speed of internet, both Upload and Download are virtually the same
  • Access to more TV channels that I want to see especially news
  • The system seems a little bit more advanced than anything we have been on before

Summary

I am happy with the switch over so far, no doubt there will be issues and I hope they address them more professionally than Shaw did.

Update April 2022

I’m updating this post with some events since I wrote it.

The Home part of Telus continues to be stable, that is the internet and cable television. We haven’t experienced much downtime over their fibre option. There were some issues with BBC World News stalling now and again, but it was minimal.

The Mobility, mobile phone, service of Telus wasn’t so good. The signal in this area is chronically bad. This has been particularly dangerous to emergency services that are reliant on these services. Telus is not the only provider that has these issues in this area.  We live in an area that is pretty central with many people living in it. Telus was supposed to put in a tower but for some reason, they have not taken this forward.  Whenever I reported issues of bad signal Telus Mobility pretty much ignored me, and I did report it a number of times. I eventually managed to speak with someone at Telus, which was pretty stressful to do after being pushed from one person to the next, the result of this came to nought but they did come up with a couple of suggestions.

So, as a result of poor mobile signal, I had to get a Telus home phone service. Of course, I am sure Telus were very happy I’m giving them more money but I do feel quite upset over the issue.

Update December 2022

Another short update since I wrote the initial blog entry.

For the home phone, mentioned above, I was actually expecting a copper wire-connected telephone service so that if the internet went down we would still have a phone to use. However, they connected a VOIP service. The person they sent to install it must have been new and didn’t really know what he was doing, poor thing, he had to keep calling back to his office.

On one channel we kept losing a signal, so I reached out to Telus and got connected to a customer service agent who I was getting nowhere with, wanting to send me down a path to change all my channels. After 45 minutes in live chat, I finally got to someone who made sense but was not sure if the issue was really addressed. Posting on the Telus Forum I notice others have been experiencing this issue, same on Rogers and Shaw, so maybe it was the feed from the US.

On a year-end positive note, it was easy to renew our fixed-term contract with Telus. If this hadn’t happened it would have increased our bill by $100, if that happened I would have downsized our service considerably.

Update 16 January 2023

The worst-case scenario came about today.  On 16th December 2022 Telus promised to, kindly, put us back on the 2-year plan we were on before. However, receiving their bill today, this wasn’t the case. So did they lie to us or is this another Telus administrative blunder? The Home Phone service went up by 253.846% and we were supposed to be on the same fixed price until March 2024.  The Internet went up by just over 100% and looks as though they didn’t apply the bundle they promised.

So, what now. I really don’t feel like calling them again and to be honest I have been looking at what Shaw has to offer. I took auto-payments off as I really don’t want any funds to go through to Telus until this is resolved if it ever is.

Update 18 January 2023

The issue with the contract has, thankfully, been resolved.

On the 17th I got onto social media, and they created a ticket to the relevant department. On the 18th, a lovely rep got back to us and apologised, and was able to fix the issue pretty easily. So, it all worked out very well.