Grapevine

CityWest Optic Cable / Oakley Rankin

Like many of us on Denman and Hornby I have now been connected to the CityWest optical system.  I opted for the slowest speed of 30Mbps at $68 monthly, internet only; I am keeping our phone with Telus so far; we have no use for a suite of cable TV channels.

The installation was easy, direct, and quick.  The first stage was a trench up our driveway to install a gray connection box on the side of our house.  They easily avoided our underground power cable.  Then a thin 6mm (quarter-inch) cable was run from the connection box up the outside wall and through into my heated crawl space.  From there a single hole through the drywall brought the cable to the same place on my desk that the Telus modem occupied.  Once the optical cable was connected to the Gigaspire Blast u6x modem and tested I simply switched all my internet cables from the Telus Actiontec T3200M—I like to wire as many devices as possible; then I went online and changed the Gigaspire passwords to match the Telus ones and, presto, all wireless devices I have now connected with no problems whatsoever.

So will it all make a difference?  For me not much.  I generally have only a single machine accessing the internet at any given time and I usually keep it wired rather than using WiFi.  On my computer I don’t indulge in many data intensive operations but I do watch several video streaming services using an internet connection—Mhz, Britbox, France24, DW, Acorn, Kanopy, Aljazeera, CBC Gem, etc.—and my consistent Telus speed of 5 Mbps over the past decade has sufficed to handle all this without buffering.  At my pace the only real difference I see is a satisfactory increase in downloading speed for the very few large files I occasionally get.  The real advantage will show up is in those households with more and more people and devices all attempting to use the internet at the same time.  Or those users who pass gigantic files back and forth on the internet.  Or 4K broadcast TV when it becomes widespread.  And gamers, of course.  So why did I choose to switch?  Largely because of Telus’ poor policy.  A year ago Telus phased out installation of any new copper cable service but offered no plans to supply the optic replacement to folks out in the boonies.  I had a Telus sales person offer me a 1000 Mbps service for $35 monthly and when I explained that this required optical cable and was impossible on our island she simply ignored me and continued to ask me to sign up for a service unavailable on Hornby.  Although I have to admit that $35 for a service that CityWest charges $138 was kind of appealing!

For those of you who might be worried about being blasted with an increased dose of EMR you can take heart for optical cables do not transmit electricity and thus do not have a electromagnetic field generated around them.  The light that is transmitted is a part of the overall electromagnetic spectrum but it does not share the relationship of electricity and magnetism and so does not create any EMR.  So the cable coming up my driveway as well as the cable from the connection box to the modem have actually diminished the amount of EMR generated by your Telus telephone line although, if truth be told, the EMR field generated by a telephone cable is infinitesimal compared to that of the power lines passing by and into your home.  The electronics in the Gigaspire modem have exactly the same current requirements that my Telus modem has—12 volts DC and 3 amps, somewhat less than an old 40 watt incandescent light bulb.  WiFi is, of course, broadcast EMR and I am told by the CityWest installer that the Gigaspire has no more range than the Telus Actiontec as range is restricted by Federal Law.  So if you have been running a Telus modem similar to mine the Gigaspire should be no different as to EMR radiation but the lines running into it certainly will be.  And I apologize for my earlier screeds in the Grapevine for suggesting that the Gigaspire had a much greater range; I am afraid I was taken in by the hype about their modems on the manufacturer’s web site.

Another question sparking anxiety is whether CityWest telephone service be available in a power outage.  And the answer is it easily can be PROVIDING you have an alternate power source for the Gigaspire modem.  This could be a Universal Power Supply (UPS) as one or two of my neighbours have purchased; when the power goes out this will automatically switch to keep your modem powered for a limited time.  Or a generator to keep the modem running and annoy your neighbours.  Telus lines on the hydro poles are, of course, extremely strong and a mid-sized tree will usually hang on them or break itself.  However if the Telus line is hit by an over-height semi-trailer, as ours was a couple of years ago, it will take Telus about 3 to 4 days to restore telephone service to you and all your neighbours—as it did.  You might contrast this with the 30 hours it took CityWest to repair their cable under water!

So is CityWest prone to more outages than Telus?  Probably a few more for the reason that it is a buried cable and there are a lot of backhoe operators working around doing things like culvert installation and various trenching jobs.  Cutting through an optical cable is inevitable but I don’t believe it will happen sufficiently often to cause any real problems although the increasing number of folks who are on social media seconds after an outage saying the whole system is broken will take it as grist for their mill of perfection.  Why does social media encourage folks to believe that a system covering a huge area of our province, involving thousands of people and thousands miles of cable, of running on banks of complicated electronic machinery, with tens of thousands of customers, is completely broken when a rare accidental event takes place?  We used to know that human constructions, like humans themselves, were fallible and we accepted accidents; social media seems to feed us the fantasy that we really are, or should be, perfect.  And I am not the only one who has noticed; Shosanna Zuboff of Harvard in her book Surveillance Capitalism gives an idea of why this might be.  At my grandson’s graduation she encouraged him and the other 900 engineers graduating to resist the technocratic imperative and to spend adequate time with the arts and humanities.  I can only say aye, aye.

I haven’t liked to go into how dangerous the Covid 19 gene-therapy shots are, as so many of my family members, friends and neighbours have taken them.  I don’t want people to be frightened because there is nothing they can do about it now.  I am pleased to say, my sisters and their families have stopped taking the boosters.  I choose to speak out on the subject of vaccine injuries as they are so prevalent and so very unnecessary. 

I read an article from The Children’s Health Defense about an Ontario man in his late 40’s.  He had some Covid 19 vaccinations and had a bad vaccine injury.  They call it, “Covid 19 Vaccination Syndrome,” and it is indistinguishable from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.  I know a lot about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) as I have lived with it for more than twenty years.  I became ill with puzzling symptoms after a bad bout of the flu.  This is a typical presentation of CFS.

We were told by Public Health Officials that the vaccines were safe and effective.  There was no way they could have known this because the vaccines were not tested over the usual five to ten year time period needed to assess the effects of a vaccine.  The gene therapy preparations were made ready in a matter of weeks.  

Usually, vaccines are tested in vitro, then in small animal studies where the mice are given a dose of vaccine and then they are monitored and their progeny is monitored for months or years before they go on to study the effects in rabbits in the same manner and then in primates until after many years, it is decided it is likely safe enough to test on humans.  None of this was done with the Covid 19 injectables.  

Even with all these precautions, there were still vaccine injuries and a number of vaccines have been pulled off the market even after all these studies because they were found to cause injuries and death.  

Well, the Ontario man got very sick after his Covid shots and a booster.  He lost a great deal of function. Typically, the patient presents with fatigue, weakness, sleep disorders, a lot of physical pain and mental fog which makes even the simplest tasks very difficult.  When I was ill for the first few years, before I found ways to stabilize my condition, it often felt as if I was trying to function while experiencing nitrogen narcosis.  Before I became ill, I was a passionate SCUBA diver and experienced nitrogen narcosis a number of times.  The confusion is profound.  

So, this poor man, who had been well and healthy, took the Covid 19 vaccinations because the Public Health Officials and his own physician told him it was safe and effective.  Well, we now know it is not effective at stopping people from contracting Covid 19 and from spreading it.  So much for, “No one is safe until everyone is safe.”  

He became very ill.  He was hospitalized for feeling suicidal.  I too felt suicidal when I became ill as I had previously been very healthy and fit.  Because I had the support of my family and friends, I was able to pull myself together and decide that if I was willing to kill myself then I should also be willing to pursue every possible way of improving my health.  

The young man in Ontario was not so lucky.  Instead of being helped to overcome his illness he was offered euthanasia.  He was confused, depressed and desperate.  He accepted MAiD to end his suffering.  

His case was one selected for review in Ontario.  “This case shows how the Canadian Healthcare system abandoned a suicidal patient in need of real medical and psychiatric care.  If it had not come from a Government report, I would have difficulty believing this horrifying case history,” wrote Dr. Aaron Kheriaty. 

The fact is, the patient was mentally ill at the time he was killed and mental illness should have disqualified him from receiving death by a Doctor.  The members of the panel who investigated his case questioned how a condition, “previously unrecognized  in medicine his “post vaccine somatic syndrome,” could be considered incurable given limited available clinical knowledge and research.”

Even the very few safeguards around receiving euthanasia in Canada are routinely ignored.  Track Two patients, those who are not terminally ill, are supposed to have a 90-day waiting period between applying for Maid and being killed.  The median time between requesting MAiD and being killed is only eleven days and I got that statistic from Health Canada.  

If this poor man had not taken the Covid 19 gene therapy that made him so ill, he would be alive and well today.  I find it appalling that he did the, “right thing and rolled up his sleeve,” to take a shot of a toxic product that left him disabled and was then casually killed by the very medical professionals who had a duty to care for him.