(Sh)aw, hell

Until recently, I was a subscriber to the high-speed cable internet service of @Home, provided by local franchisee Shaw Cable. I'd always been happy with the service; it was fast, reliable and easy. It came with an optional piece of software that allowed users to monitor their incoming e-mails, view TV listings for their area, get up-to-date weather, stock and horroscope reports, and also served as a news ticker and internet radio tuner. All in one program that was unobtrusive, skinable and had a tiny system footprint. Naturally, it stopped functioning when the @Home network collapsed, and it's only one of the things I've had to learn to do without.

Throughout the course of @Home's corporate dissolution, Shaw has maintained the internet service, and made sure all their customer's switched over their e-mail and webspace accounts to a new datacenter. I commend their efforts in keeping everything running smooth, but I can't help but notice that under the new Shaw plan, I have far fewer benefits available to me as a customer, but I'm paying the same amount. I'll run down the problems I've been having since the switch-over:

1) With @Home, I could access my POP mail through hotmail when I was away from the house. Shaw doesn't offer that option, and you have to visit Shaw's specific webmail site to remotely access your mail. But their site is buggy and very lacking in features.
2) Shaw's newsgroup servers are unresponsive and sluggish.
3) The Shaw user control-panel is hard to find and harder to use.
4) Not helper programs
5) No one at Shaw's customer support has any idea when any of these issues might be fixed.

There was a time when I would have said "Give me net access, give me an e-mail account, and everything else is fluff", but I think it's bad strategy to offer a range of services to your clients for 3 years, then yank them and have no plan in place to offer equivalents, especially when the reduction is actual services provided is not matched by a decrease in price paid. So today, the ladies and germs at Shaw High Speed internet become the second winners of the ianwallace.com Stupid God-damned Fucker Award. Congrats!