Frustration over lengthy landline outage

Peter Kostiuk and other tenants of a south Winnipeg condo building remained without functional landlines for more than a month after a telecommunications cable was inadvertently damaged, cutting service to thousands of Bell MTS customers.

The outage, which began Nov. 22, frustrated residents of 1660 Pembina Hwy., who continued to pay for the unusable service and were given no timeline on when it would be restored.

“I’ve been an MTS customer since 1981 when I moved to the city, and I’ve always had good service, but when this landline issue arose, the fact is, I felt I was being prevaricated,” said Kostiuk, who pays about $59 per month to use his landline.

“I don’t know what to believe, and I don’t want to go to Rogers or Telus.”

Although he could make some outgoing calls, Kostiuk said his landline would not ring when people dialed his number. In addition, he periodically received phone calls intended for another tenant in the building.

Multiple attempts to resolve this issue via customer support yielded “a lot of malarkey from Bell.” Kostiuk said he felt there was little urgency to resolve the problem, and a lack of concern about how the outage was affecting customers.

On Tuesday, one day after the Free Press contacted Bell MTS about the outage, Kostiuk’s phone line was back in service and he was granted a billing credit.

“I’m both happy and disappointed that it needed a call to the media to get the issue supposedly resolved,” he said.

Bell MTS spokesperson David Marcille said Kostiuk was part of a larger group of landline customers who were affected when a third-party contractor damaged critical infrastructure while drilling beneath Pembina Highway.

The contractor, who was working on behalf of another telecommunications provider, struck a concrete conduit owned by Bell MTS. Multiple cables were damaged and approximately 7,300 service pairs were affected, he said.

“Bell teams responded immediately and worked through the night to restore critical services, including to Victoria Hospital. While the majority of services were restored promptly, smaller localized outages occurred during subsequent repair blocks and were corrected as quickly as possible,” Marcille said in an email statement.

“Significant reconstruction needed to take place, and we continue to reconnect remaining lines. We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate our customers’ patience.”

Jeannette Ali, secretary of the condo board, said several tenants have complained about ongoing issues with their phone lines.

“This has been ridiculous. It’s been well over a month that they have not been addressing the people in our building,” she said.

Ali said a backup phone line that provides security and fire-monitoring services to the building was also affected by the outage.

“Our security system is supposed to have two lines: a primary and a backup. Well, it’s no good if the backup is dead. From a condo board standpoint, that’s the issue we’re concerned about,” she said.

The secondary line hadn’t been restored as of Tuesday afternoon.

Ali said she knows of at least one tenant who cancelled their Bell MTS service out of frustration. She estimated that more than a dozen people in the building are customers.

It is the second time Bell MTS customers in the building have experienced outages this year; lines were down for more than one week over the summer, Ali said.

tyler.searle@freepress.mb.ca