People living in Tolstoi have never had good cell reception, but a recent problem with BellMTS landlines has left roughly 50 homeowners with virtually no telephone communication capabilities at all.

For nearly a month, Lil Fisher and her fellow Tolstoi residents have struggled with a phone line she calls “sketchy” at best. She says the random connection failures can last for as short as a handful of minutes or as long as an entire day.

Neufeld says she has seen BellMTS crews working near this phone connection box in her yard in recent days. “There’s no rhyme or reason to it, in the morning it might be working and in the afternoon it might not,” describes Fisher. “For us, that means we’re paying $80 a month for a service we are not even able to use consistently.”

Fisher says her family has a special cell phone booster that they can use in a very specific part of their garage if absolutely necessary, but even that plan is not foolproof.

“If the power goes out we have nothing and that is what scares me the most. If there is ever an emergency we have no way of contacting anybody.”

Vita resident Bev Neufeld has elderly parents living in the area and says she understands exactly what Fisher is referring to. 

"I never know when they're going to have service, it’s just the luck of picking up the phone and seeing if you have a dial tone or not.”

Neufeld says her father is not in the best of health and ordinarily she would call him to check on his wellbeing. However, with the phone lines consistently down, she is forced to make the commute almost daily to ensure her parents are okay.

“It’s very inconvenient driving back and forth,” she stresses. 

Both Neufeld and Fisher have made efforts to communicate their frustrations to BellMTS over the past week and both have achieved similar results.

“I phoned MTS myself because I couldn’t get ahold of my mom,” explains Neufeld, "they said they were trying to fix it, but they have no date, no information, and all they said was that ‘everybody involved knows what

Reeve David Carlson says the RM will do what they can to pressure BellMTS to resolve this situation. the priorities are’.”

Fisher indicates that the response she received was equally disheartening. BellMTS said they would credit her bill to compensate for the inconvenience once the line was fixed, but could give no date as to when that would be.

A spokesperson from BellMTS acknowledged the problem but could not confirm any kind of timeline stating: “Our techs in the area are continuing to investigate and isolate the cause. We hope to restore full services soon.”

When Emerson-Franklin Reeve David Carlson was made aware of the issue earlier this week he immediately drove to Tolstoi to verify. After speaking with residents he believes there is an infrastructure malfunction and is troubled by the longevity of the problem.

“For us, it’s quite distressing cause the landline is their lifeline,” states the Reeve. “Our office is contacting BellMTS to seek clarification on what is going on and we are going to put the pressure on to get this resolved as quickly as possible. This is definitely not acceptable.”

Carlson affirms the residents of Tolstoi that he is on their side and will do what he can to help.