To our Valued Customers:

We have been informed that Telus union employees will be able to walk off the job legally on either Feb. 3rd or 5th. It is not confirmed by any Telus personnel to us that they will strike, but we are hearing that preparations for a strike are under way.

We do not as of yet have an official statement from our Telus representatives as to what this will mean with respect to service levels for our customers and ourselves, or if indeed there will be a strike.

However, we do believe that there will problems during this strike. At the very least, significant slow downs in ordering in and repairing circuits must be expected. Telus owns all the copper in Alberta and B.C. which runs the phone system for our dialup customers, and over which all DSL traffic in Alberta and B.C. flows. So if a circuit should go down for whatever reason that only Telus employees can fix, we have to assume that this will take time to repair.

Telus is also our main, but not only, Internet Gateway supplier. We are dynamically hosted to another supplier, so that our main web and other servers are expected to continue to function should a problem arise with the Telus network. But there is a chance that our service might become somewhat sluggish if we have to divert all traffic to our alternate supplier.

Please be advised that if you are ordering circuits or other telecommunications services now or soon, there is a very good chance that those orders will not be executed for weeks longer than originally quoted, or even months if the strike persists.