More on @BizLondon January cover about @Startca #LdnOnt
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Satellite Blaster 3000
Roughly three times every winter, I fill a bucket with warm water, grab a pump-action water cannon normally used around a swimming pool and head into the backyard. I trek through the deep snow, being careful as I step off the deck, and go to the side of the house where I have a clear view of the Shaw Direct satellite dish mounted two storeys up on my roof.
I fill the cannon with about two litres of water and lean against the fence to get the best possible angle. Then I fire the water toward the dish, trying to hit directly in the middle where snow and ice have settled in, intercepting the TV signal that has made it all the way to my house from a satellite in orbit high above me. It usually takes three shots to clear the dish surface, but high winds can play havoc with my aim. On rare occasions I have to fill the bucket a second time, but one bucket of water normally does the trick.
It doesn’t happen during blizzards. During intense storms, the wind keeps the snow from settling on the dish. It happens when the snow is wet and falling gently. First it takes out my HD channels, then it comes for the standard def channels. If snow in the backyard is especially deep and I want to avoid going out there, I will live on standard def for most of a Saturday. But eventually, I give in and arm myself for battle.
I doubt very much I’m the only one in this boat – or dish, if you will -- but I will admit I’ve never seen anyone else attacking his dish with a water cannon either. In any case, it’s an excellent reason to consider switching to another service. I swore off Rogers years ago and would like to continue that policy, in part because Shaw Direct is much cheaper. I have looked into Bell Fibe but not seriously.
As you can read about in this month’s Business London cover story, there soon will be another option in London and surrounding environs. Start.ca is a small but surprisingly well-established communications company that until recently has focused on providing Internet and phone-over-Internet service to about 50,000 customers. Sometime before spring, when I could still be firing water at my satellite dish, the company will launch Start TV.
Co-founders Peter Rocca and Darryl Olthoff started as small as it was possible to be, running a BBS while students at Fanshawe College. Reaching 100 customers was cause for celebration and prompted them to buy a whole whack of new modems. Twenty years later, they employ 130 and expect to nearly triple that in the next five years.
Growth will come from two primary areas – although they also have an elaborate system of hosting company servers and linking them off-site via fibre optic cable. For several years, Start has been installing fibre optic lines throughout London, mostly downtown but increasingly out into residential neighbourhoods. That allows the company to provide whiz bang Internet service to thousands of businesses and homes for less than most of us pay for slow, unreliable copper-wire Internet service from Rogers and Bell.
Of interest to those of us spraying snow off our satellite dishes, Start has finally worked through a maze of regulatory challenges, and will launch its own TV service in the next couple of months. If you live somewhere in reach of its fibre optic service, the new TV service will blow your mind. That’s because unlike Bell’s Fibe, Start will run fibre optic right into your house. There will be no copper wire logjam to gum up the high-speed data streaming.
If you’re not in a Start fibre optic zone, you can still get the TV service, with its more intuitive features, for less than other TV options. I could very well be one of those customers next winter, which means this could be the last year I have to load up the water gun and head into the backyard.