A COVID-19 Update from Start.ca

Start Talk | 19

Recorded June, 2020

On Friday, March 13^th, Ontario went into a state of emergency due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

How was Start.ca affected by this sudden change? As an essential business, we have remained open, though we have had to make several major changes to our day-to-day norms in order to protect our staff and our customers.

During the week of March 9^th while governments and organizations across Canada were scrambling to figure out how to face the coming storm, Start.ca chose to lead by example. We made the early decision to get as many of our staff working from home as possible. “It certainly has impacted everyone in the organization,” states Start.ca CEO, Peter Rocca, in our first ever socially distant episode of Start Talk, “We had to relocate about 170 people over the course of a couple of days.”

Though it wasn’t easy, we managed to safely and efficiently get nearly all of our staff working from home with minimal impact on customer wait times during the transition.

Installations

For new customers, wait times on installations have been a little longer than usual. Completing installations typically requires an onsite technician so we have had to step up precautions to help keep both customers and technicians safe.

Network traffic

There’s also the matter of the surge in internet traffic since more people are working from home or keeping themselves entertained with streaming. This additional network traffic can put strain on our systems, however, Start.ca is being proactive about this. When asked about how we are coping with the new traffic, this was Rocca’s response: “We are not doing any throttling. We made some significant investments to upgrade some of our capacities to our network when this hit.”

Service and support

To deal with the increase in call volume, we’ve hired new employees with other opportunities still open. For more information on current open positions, please visit our careers page, here.

Hardware orders

Other facets of our business have not been particularly affected. You can still order different products to be shipped to your home, so adding Start TV or phone service to your package, or purchasing a Mercku router is as easy as ever.

Working with the communtiy

We’ve also stepped up wherever possible to do our part to help take on COVID-19. We upgraded speeds for our enterprise fibre business customers at no extra cost to them to help enable their employees to work remotely. Our fibre team also worked with the city of London to provide fibre internet to the temporary LHSC Field Hospital at the Agriplex, as well as one of the new COVID-19 Screening Facilities. We were able to get these sites connected to active fibre internet within 48 hours of the request, including construction! Go team!

We know this hard, but we really are in this together. If you need us, we’re here for you. The resiliency and support we’ve seen across the London community has certainly inspired us and we hope that you are finding bright spots of your own during these difficult times.

That’s all for now. For further updates on the situation, be sure to check our social media pages.

Take care and stay safe.