The answer? Nothing… if you are like 99.9999% of our Worldline Internet customers that is. But on very rare occasions, there are a select few who get the dreaded “wall garden.” So – what is it exactly?

It’s this:

The Wall garden is what appears on our customers browsers when they are so severely past due on their account, we’re about to cancel their service.

Worldline, as the best priced ISP in Canada, depend on our customers keeping up with their payments to ensure that we can keep our prices as low as possible. We run a lean ship and that’s what allows us to charge so little for our data and voice services and the last thing we want to do is to hire a team of collection people to spend all day on the phone trying to get in touch with folks who are way behind on their payments. 

Instead, for those who are overly maturing their bills, we reach out to them via e-mail. The first one is a friendly reminder that goes out at 11 days past their payment due. If we receive no payment, they get another message 36 days past due. Then on the day 43, we give our customers a notice of suspension. They have two days to pay us or… it’s wall garden time – our measure of last resort.

We hate to do it, but on supremely rare occasions, it’s the only way to let our customers know that they are in serious trouble of losing their service.

Wall gardens have become a more prevalent tool with ISP’s these days. One of the big three (who shall remain nameless – but their name does start win an “R”) use them to let their customers know they’ve exceeded their data caps. (We don’t do that of course, because we have no data caps.) They also send them out to customers who are choosing to leave them in a last gasp effort to make them stay by giving them special offers etc. We don’t do that either because, well, it’s kinda creepy really.

For us, it’s a way to inexpensively and automatically remind our customers that their account is in serious jeopardy and they should act as soon as possible, and, it’s working.

We know that sometimes in everyone’s lives, stuff happens that is beyond their control and they fall behind. We understand that. However, we need to ensure and maintain a regular payment schedule for us to continue to be the best deal in telecom in Canada.