Yak High Speed Internet
Our Yak High Speed Internet has been down since August 1st. That’s 11 days of not having a network connection at home.
For most I suppose it may not be that big a deal, but then again. How long do you think you could live without the Internet, email, online banking, working from home (telecommuting)?
The network is fine from our side. The router is ok, we are getting Username denied because Yak moved away from Teksavvy and tried to handle the tech side of being an Internet Service Provider (ISP) on their own. Previously they were a 3rd party reseller of Teksavvy, which resells Bells DSL bandwidth. The transfer over must have dropped lots of customers ID’s on the domain because apparently we are joining a long list of those affected.
As an IT professional I know a bit more about the issues they are talking about and the bits and pieces of facts I can get out of the tech support group. Yak should be ashamed of themselves. 11 days of downtime in a month is ridiculous, it is 1/3 of the month. Even worse, it happened on the long weekend while we were actually home and wanted to use the network.
Yak is legally covered by their Terms of Service (TOS) and doesn’t owe us anything, but if they want to keep us as a customer I am expecting the issue to be resolved shortly and a refund of the entire months service fee, not just refunding the days of the outage.
We may have to look for another company to be our ISP, and take our phone business with us. Right now Teksavvy is leading the pack. At least they were able to provide us with the services we were paying for.
August 12th, 2009 at 9:14 pm
Why’d you and Lauren switch from Teksavvy to Yak originally?
August 12th, 2009 at 9:43 pm
We actually switched from Bell to Yak.
Bell may have treated us really poorly with customer service, price, blocked ports and throttled bandwidth, but the network was always available.
Internet came back up tonight. It’s been 12 days. That’s 38.7% of the month of August without Internet access.
We’ll see what Yak does for us.
November 12th, 2009 at 10:15 am
Regarding Yak outage (July 31 – ????). I have been in dispute with Yak for 3 months now. After waiting 7 days and making innumerable phone calls to tech support, I canceled my service with Yak, as they could provide no estimate of time for restoration of service. In fact they were totally clueless. At one point during the outage I contacted Yak billing and asked if a credit would be applied for down time, and I was assured that it would be. So much for that, not only did I not get credited, but they have been charging for me Hi-speed for the last 4 months. Notwithstanding that I have had service with Acanac since Aug 8. I am surprised that I have found only two comments (googling) regarding this outage. Reading from previous responses, I estimate the outage lasted somewhere around 14 days. I note the comments from Ness’ Outpost regarding the Yak terms of service. However the way I see it, the concept of “reasonable” has to have some standing. I cannot believe that a court of law would accept these TOS, as an reason for failure to provide service for an indefinite period of time. It is clear that this outage was caused solely by the actions of Yak, who were grossly negligent in failing to have a fallback plan in the event failure. I know that technology is not infallible and that failures will happen, however the length of the Yak outage, ranges way beyond reasonable, and no court of law is going to rule in favor of a company who is charging for a service they are not, and cannot provide. I decided to take this one to the CRTC.
November 12th, 2009 at 11:24 am
Gerry,
Lodging a complaint with the CRTC is a good idea – it creates an official history that is recorded. Blogs come and go, and comments on blogs are even worse as they can be moderated, edited, etc. But don’t expect any satisfaction as they are not a court of law. In my situation and opinion it would be far too expensive to take this to a court of law for the outage.
If I were truly outraged I would simply move my business like you did and vote with my wallet. Now you do have some valid complaints that you are still being billed for services no longer subscribed to. Which when sorted out will likely result in a refund – without interest even though they have your money – so in reality is also unsatisfying.
Yak refunded our account for the days we were without Internet ($20.88), not for the entire month. I think this is the result a court of law would also reach. It’s fair, but not satisfying as a customer who was put out because of the company.
What it comes down to is that the activation energy (cancelling, hook up charges, sending back the modem and filters, getting a new one) to switch companies is just too high. We are happy with our phone service, and the Internet is usually fine – except for this two weeks. We even have a static IP for free right now which is a value of $5 per month. I think this is a workaround because of the poor way that Yak has the network setup for now. It could disappear at any moment.