Disconnected: Customer Complaints With NFTC Service

Jeff Green | May 03, 2023

Carrie Westlake is frustrated. She lives on Bobs Lake, not far from Crow Lake Road, in South Frontenac, but is within the catchment area of NFTC (the acronym used by North Frontenac Telephone Company) which has its local office in Sharbot Lake.

NFTC covers the Sharbot Lake and Tichborne region, the 279 and 375 phone exchanges, and also operates in Haliburton as well as Elgin County, and rural areas around London, in Western Ontario.

In addition to phone service, they provide Internet and Internet based television service.

It is the services she receives from NFTC that have her so frustrated, that she has resorted to camping out in the basement of the NFTC office a couple of times in recent weeks, in order to connect to her job in the insurance business.

It wasn't always like this, however.

“My husband and I moved to Bobs Lake in 2017, wanting to get away from Toronto,” she told the News this week, “and I needed a phone and Internet connection in order to work virtually from home. My husband works for Tackaberry in Perth, so he is fine, but I am dependent on this service. NFTC was the only service we had access to because of our location, and they provided reliable service, until about a year ago.”

That was when she began to find her Internet service started to deteriorate. The service would drop in the middle of Zoom calls, and she would have to turn her modem off and on, and sometimes it would not come back right away.

Recently things have become much worse.

“Last weekend was approximately the fourth weekend in a row that we have gone without the Internet for most of the weekend. And during the weekdays, Internet service has been intermittent at times,” she said, in an open letter that she sent out late last week to NFTC, local politicians, and the Frontenac News.

“I work at home full-time, my head office is in Markham, Ontario. There is no opportunity for me to go anywhere else to do my work. I am expected to work from my home eight hours a day, I am expected to have reasonably functioning Internet, and if I do not, I am at risk of losing my job. That is completely unacceptable. To worry that I may lose my job, to have that threat hanging over my head every time the internet doesn’t work, is an unacceptable way to live and an unacceptable level of service,” she said in her letter.

She added that her interaction with NFTC, over the outages, has been difficult as well.

“We are told to call specific people for help, but there is never a response. We are given numbers to contact people on the weekend, again without response. There is absolutely no reasonable level of service in an emergency situation, let alone fixing the outage. Yet we continue to be billed monthly for the service, on par with other Internet services, without any reduction. We are paying full price, and market value, for a service that does not nearly meet the market standards. This is also unacceptable,” she wrote.

She also operates an Internet based side business on weekends that she has been unable to operate for over a month.

She added that she “understands there are people in the area who have been without Internet service for a month.”

Over the last 18 months, other people have contacted the News about NFTC services, in different locations within the NFTC catchment area.

In one case, a reader contacted the News to report that service in the Clarendon area, on Road 509, was completely out for weeks, between April and early July in 2021. The reader said they were informed that the network had deteriorated to the point where it could not be fixed, and in the end, that part of the network was fast tracked to have its copper wire service replaced with fibre optic service, which was installed in July.

“We went from no phone or Internet service at all for 2 months, to the 21st century, when the fibre was finally installed,” said the reader.

Another local resident, who also lives in one of the more remote locations in the township, told us at the News that they recently signed up with Starlink, and have since cancelled all service with NFTC, including phone service, after having a contract with the company for over 40 years.

Carrie Westlake and her husband, Chris Arbeau, do not have that option.

“For myself, leaving North Frontenac Telephone Company and going to another service provider is an impossibility. Due to our landscape and topography, we are unable to have any kind of satellite service. We have been in touch with the satellite companies, they have been out here to check our lot, and confirm this,” she said. They also do not have anything but very limited access to cell service, she added.

Not everyone requires the Internet for their employment, as she does, but Carrie Westlake points out that the service has become essential in many other ways as well.

“In our current age of technology, Internet services are invaluable. More and more, every aspect of our daily lives depends on Internet services. The government of Canada has already expressed that it considers providers of Internet services to have a higher duty of care to their patrons.”

In response to an inquiry from the News regarding timelines for responding to reports of outages, Craig Hinschberger, NFTC regional Manager - Sharbot Lake, responded by email with the following statement: "In light of some of our recent challenges, NFTC is adding additional resources within our local network footprint to help deliver increased reliability, stronger service levels and faster repair times to all of our valued customers.

"When dealing with our historic copper telephone lines, there can be significant variations in the types of repairs required, which can make it difficult to determine exact service restoration timelines in some circumstances. With that said, we’re committed to improving our response times and continuing to invest in the network to provide the best possible service experience to all of our neighbours within our community.

If there is ever an issue in response times, especially in circumstances that may put elderly or health compromised individuals in a vulnerable position, I welcome NFTC customers to call me on my personal cell phone, 519-630-3989."

In response to a second question about NFTC timelines for replacing the copper wire based phone/internet lines with fibre, the current industry standard, Hinschberger replied with the following: "With the increase in broadband demands in recent years, service through historic copper phone lines is becoming far less sustainable than other network technologies, such as pure fibre.

"NFTC has launched extensive pure fibre investment plans throughout our service footprint to help deliver much faster internet speeds while drastically reducing the amount of service issues our customers may have.

"NFTC has already mobilized construction crews in a number of areas within our community over the past 2 years, and we will continue to put significant resources towards fibre advancements in years 2023 through 2026. More information on new fibre expansions will be presented on our website at www.nftctelecom.com in the coming weeks."

The government of Ontario has established the goal of ensuring that all residents of Ontario have reliable access to Internet service, and to that end contracts have been awarded to providers to expand service into underserved pockets of Ontario.

NFTC has received one of those contracts, but not for this region. Their contract is for a region that they serve in southwest Ontario. In Frontenac County, Bell Canada received the contract, but they do not provide service in the Sharbot Lake and Parham areas.