The competition between Manitoba Telecom Services and Shaw Communications is heating up as both companies vie for customers on their local phone, internet and television services.

Shaw would not say how many Winnipeg customers it has picked up since launching its digital phone service in July, saying only that it has been "very busy." The company is luring customers from the long-standing MTS monopoly on local phone service with flat-fee packages that offer unlimited long distance calling within North America for a few dollars less than similar services offered through MTS.

However, some new converts say bugs in the Shaw's digital phone system have left them fuming.

After 57 years with MTS, Ray Dunn and his wife switched to Shaw's service to save a little money. He said he ran into numerous problems with the digital service. Sometimes, he said, he couldn't get a dial tone for hours or days, and when he did, the calls were often dropped.

"We had at least five or six different service men, as they call them, come and they all seemed to know what they were doing, but it didn't help any. None of them," he told CBC.

"Because we're old, if anything happens to one of us, the other's got to phone the ambulance service or the paramedics or whatever."

After 17 days on digital, Dunn switched back to his old phone. He's not alone: consumer-written websites about the issue are rife with similar complaints. Some customers also complained that home-alarm companies wouldn't take on customers with digital phones because the technology is too unreliable.

Some experts speculate Shaw's problems may be simple growing pains. The company had been losing cable-service customers to MTS, they said, and so Shaw may have jumped the gun with its digital phone service.

"Certainly MTS has had some success in the market, acquiring about 50,000 TV customers to date, so there may have been some pressure there for Shaw to perhaps hasten its [telephone] rollout in the Winnipeg market," said Mario Mota with Decima Research.

Shaw officials would not agree to an interview on the matter, but the company says it has received no more complaints about its phone service than about its cable or internet services.