It’s Spring Break. Do You Know Where Your Children Are?
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Working with the Mothership
Having been established in 1880, Ma Bell was all on its own providing telephone service for more than 100 years. Essentially functioning as a monopoly, Bell Canada had virtually a 100% market share from sea to shining sea. That was until the 1980’s, when the federal government decided that for the country as a whole, and its people in particular, this probably wasn’t the greatest of ideas.
Competition, they decided, was a good thing.
And thus came the great telecommunications gold rush that lead to companies like Worldline’s parent company Fibernetics to be born. Fibernetics is something called a CLEC (pronounced Sea-Lek), which stands for “Competitive Local Exchange Carrier” and we are regulated by the CRTC. With our series of SS7 Quality switches installed across the county, we have direct connectivity into the heart of the transcontinental fiberoptic network.
What all that means is, we, just like Bell, are a phone and Internet company.
But we are unlike Bell in one very significant way. They had 100 years to wire up the country, spreading copper here, there and everywhere. Worldline has been around for 10 years, and for practical reasons we use the existing Bell infrastructure to get our services into your house.
Meaning that Bell, who is our direct competitor, is also a valued and essential partner.
Which is weird frankly.
As much as we’d like to trash Bell, how can we considering we couldn’t exist without those few meters of copper that they own that comes in off their pole into your place?
We can’t. We’re nice.
What we can do is tell you that, if you are a Bell customer, we can pretty much guarantee you are paying too much for your service. We know, because we know how much Bell charges us, and how much they are charging you – which is a lot!
The thing is, they have to charge you more than we do.
We don’t have any of that. We’re a lean, mean medium sized company focused on saving you money while providing a quality service.
Maybe one day we’ll have to worry about ratings on American Idol or how much money we lost on hosting the Olympics, but that won’t be for a while.
Until then we’ll just stick with what we’re good at.
Being nice.
The Rogers/Bell/Leafs Triumvirate
What is Twitter For?
That’s the question every company has to ask itself when they get into the microblogging thing. It breaks down like this:
“Why are we doing this?”
“What is the benefit?”
“Why would our customers follow us?”
“Who is going to be doing the Tweeting?”
“Do we have to pay them? (Which invariably followed by, “We have to pay them how much?”)
And of course, “Will it make us money?”
The thing is, these days, if a company is not on Twitter they are making a huge mistake.
And if customers aren’t following the companies that provide them with services, so are they.
Twitter is a revolution because there is no single better way to communicate with a company you are doing business with, or are thinking about doing business with, and get your voice heard immediately, than through Twitter.
None.
That’s because of two very powerful things:
It’s everywhere, and anybody can see it.
If you post on a corporate twitter feed, everybody gets to see what’s on your mind and guess what? Your problem is going to be dealt with as soon as humanly possible.
Because if it’s not, well, folks will tweet about it, and that’s generally bad.
For companies the exact opposite is true. If an organization come across a tweet from a customer with an issue, then resolves it, and then tweets about it; that’s called excellent customer service and that makes everybody look great.
This instant level of communication has never been around before. It’s transformed the relationship between company and client from a private matter to a public issue.
In other words, people suddenly have the power.
So, if you have one of our Worldline services, follow us @WorldlineCanada, and here’s what you’ll see on our feed:
- Service upgrades
- Scheduled maintenance
- Special promotions
- New product launches
…and finally, because all of that stuff is rather rare and a twitter feed always to be fed daily, (at least):
- Tips on how to save you money
That’s what Worldline is here for: To save Canadians money, because they have been paying way too much for their Internet and Home Phone.
I read that on Twitter.
The War on Netflix
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings can’t understand why Canada’s broadband cap limits remain the lowest in the developed world.
We can’t understand it either.
Listening to our customers when they are signing up for Worldline’s unlimited broadband Internet, they aren’t happy about caps on their old service.
Not happy at all.
Almost invariably they’ll say something like, “I just want to make sure. You guys don’t cap right? Seriously. No cap?”
Seriously. No cap. Which means video streaming over the Internet, regardless of how much you watch, won’t cost you extra at the end of the month. It also means you can ramp up the Netflix video quality to its highest setting.
According to a report just released by the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, (CIRA), Canada is the No.1 nation in the world when it comes to watching video online, yet major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like Rogers, Bell and Telus all just jacked up their broadband rates and are penalizing their customers in what can only be described as a blatant cash grab.
It’s not going unnoticed.
In an interview with the CBC at last month’s Consumer Electronic Show, Netflix spokesman Joris Evers said that Canadians would like to be able to use the service fully and as much as they want.
“We would love for Canadians to be unshackled of their bandwidth caps and stream as much as they want and have unlimited internet access,” he said. “Netflix is a killer app for broadband and because people want it, ISPs will sell larger packages to people and faster speeds. We drive a lot of demand for ISPs and we think they like that.”
Worldline like’s that.
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission last year estimated that about 10 per cent of adults subscribed to the service since its launch in 2010. Analysts believe that number is actually double.
And all of those millions of Canadians are probably pissed off at their ISPs.
If only they knew they had an alternative….