Bradley Farquhar realizes he’ll have to get over the “bumps in the road” in order to complete his mission of driving down internet prices for Nova Scotians.
Farquhar is the co-owner of Purple Cow Internet, a Halifax company that’s endured some online slings and arrows recently as his customers have suffered through a couple of internet outages.
Purple Cow is an internet reseller that exists because of a CRTC ruling that compelled giant internet companies to provide access to infrastructure that had been government subsidized, Farquhar explained.
“So companies like Purple Cow or City Wide or whoever else, can come along and use that infrastructure to get internet out to the end user. In doing so, we pay a monthly fee to the incumbent that is set by the CRTC,” he said. “We then go to the market and purchase our internet. We’re able to choose a lower rate because the cost of the internet itself, the actual product, has gone down over the years.
“We buy it from the same place that an Eastlink or a Bell would buy their internet.”
Purple Cow and City Wide are the two main resellers in the province. City Wide did not respond to a request for an interview.
The two companies have tens of thousands of customers across the province. Some of those customers lost access to the internet on a couple of occasions in the last couple of weeks.
“Usually, there’s no more outages on our end than there would be on any of the big guys,” Farquhar said. “In two and a half years, we haven’t had any real outages. Maybe there’s a car that hit a telephone pole or something like that, and it’s out for a small area, but this past week was the first time we ever experienced any issues. It wasn’t an issue on Purple Cow’s end, but I know it’s reflected that way and we kind of have to eat it, because at the end of the day the customer is paying us for internet service.”
Farquhar said he knows why the outages occurred and that they didn’t have anything to do with his equipment, which consists of “a bunch of computers, but big computers, like freezer size.” But people without internet access don’t care why.
“I don’t think there is an elegant way to put that, because even if you try to say it’s out of your control, then it almost sounds like a limitation” he said. “The benefit of working with an incumbent (is) that we can use their existing infrastructure to get our internet around. Because without that, we couldn’t provide our internet to people. We are fortunate, very lucky, to be able to work with these incumbents….even if sometimes they can be difficult to work with, it’s a blessing.”
Farquhar said he thinks internet resellers are already having an impact on “the big guys,” forcing them to improve customer service and be more competitive on pricing.
