Phone complaints decline, Internet up

TORONTO — Canadians are making fewer official complaints about their mobile phone plans, but more about their Internet service, said a report released Wednesday from the telecommunication industry’s consumer watchdog.

The Commissioner for Complaints for Telecommunications Services said the number of complaints it accepted fell to 9,988 in the year ending July 31 from 11,340 in the previous year.

Wireless complaints make up 52.9 per cent of those complaints, but that fell from more than 60 per cent. Internet complaints, meanwhile, now account for 26.1 per cent of the total, up by nearly nine percentage points.

The top three complaints about Internet service were for incorrect charges, misleading or non-disclosure of contract terms, and poor quality of service.

Telecom analyst Gerry Wall said the increase in Internet complaints is due in part to the aggressive expansion of BCE, the biggest target of complaints in the CCTS report. BCE has been on a push to add Internet customers.

“Their share of total volume is going up, so that means they’re going to have more complaints,” he said.

BCE accounted for 36 per cent of all complaints but their total number fell 1.4 per cent from last year. Rogers Communications had the next highest number of complaints, making up 18.2 per cent, down 23.7 per cent from the year before.

Bell spokesman Jason Laszlo said the company’s own data shows a 17 per cent reduction in complaints escalated to the CCTS so far this year as it works to deal with its customer growth.

Commissioner Howard Maker said most of the big telecom conglomerates have become serious about improving their numbers on the wireless side, but the rise in Internet complaints show that improvement hasn’t applied to all of their services.

This year marks the first time since the industry-funded consumer agency began collecting records in July 2007 that the proportion of complaints about wireless services has fallen, and the second year in a row where the total number of complaints has dropped.