back online

Early Friday morning our broadband connection was lost at home. After nearly 5 days were back online here in Whistler. Bloody ridiculous!

It has been terrible for business, the week before Christmas, as if you used high-speed Internet access for your credit or debit cards you could not process any of these transactions. Thus a severe loss of business. I know where I was working, we didn't have a dial-up back up in place and it took till Sunday before we had to set it up ourselves.

This is not helped either with Whistler Cable/SHAW Cable and their terrible technical support. I was in contact with them 5 times in total, twice for work and the rest for home, the first time to find out was it us or is everyone out. They could only give me a straight (or correct) answer last time I rang. Every other time they didn't really know what the problem was at the moment or when it would be fixed. About as helpful as a kick in the face.

I really wouldn't mind if they told us what went wrong, which we now know:

Heavy snow had weighed down B.C. Hydro wires on a transmitter near Whistler, which touched the Telus line, knocking out ADSL access to Whistler and neighbouring Pemberton.

via CBC News

But we weren't. There was a severe lack of communication. It was word of mouth and rumour that kept us up to date. Things I've heard over the last five days were from Solar flares and Sun spots to the Internet would be out for at least 2 weeks. We found out yesterday it had something to do with a fiber-optic line broken, which really isn't true either. What kind of Joke Company is this... would they got away with this in Ireland? Maybe... but I'm sure there would be way more complaining ;-)

On the lighter side of things, I started to Snowboard yesterday. I would show you a video of my first few runs, but Taidy took it so who knows when I will have access to it...