Rantings about Bell Canada

<rant>

False representation

The animals in their TV ads are outright lying. For instance, a case among many, their network can be overloaded like the network of any of their competitors, yet they pretend that it's not the case. They pretend to be faster to their main competitor which not only has a better physical media allowing higher bandwidth, but doesn't suffer as badly from throttling and network congestion.

Stupid "upgrades" and professional negligence

Often calling customers to offer new services which they don't need; Often as a result installing misconfigured material such as wireless modems at their offices, disrupting the security of the whole network which has already been secured by a third party sysadmin. Thus, sysadmins need to carefully warn small company owners to refuse any service upgrade offers.

For instance, the case of a cat5e 100mbit ethernet network in an office located behind a NetBSD firewall with two NICs, using a "commercial-grade" DSL PPPoE service, configured to have the firewall deal with PPPoE rather than the modem. One NIC serves to connect to the modem, the other to the LAN switch. The box also serves as caching DNS and HTTP proxy. Firefox browsers of the office workstations are configured to use the caching proxy.

Eventually, people switch back to IE because "Firefox stopped working" (it's configured to use the HTTP proxy). A month later an employee realizes that he can use the internet of the office via wireless from the neighborhood. Doing further testing we noticed that the internal network was also available. Hired again to secure the network, we realized that a new wireless modem was in place, open to the world, dealing with PPPoE itself, and directly plugged on the hub with the LAN computers. The new modem/router also leased IP addresses via DHCP to any added computer, including to parasite wireless hosts.

All the company owner knew about was that he was once called by Bell to "upgrade" his service to "something like fiberoptics". Some companies have in-house admins, but others need to hire third party people to deal with their network. Was this "upgrade" any necessary? They'll never need or want wireless access in the first place, and the service speed actually remained the same. But they have to pay for an additional monthly fee for a wireless modem, as well as hire the network sysadmin again to secure the network. And this is only one case story among many other similar ones. I'll avoid to rant about the VoIP regular offers for personal sanity reasons.

Unfaithful leased line services

Being a copper network monopoly, they are required by law to lease services to long distance and internet service providers. However, they are known to provide unreliable service for leased lines and are throttling the bandwidth of non-Bell internet customers below that of their own service speed. Customers need to pass through their DSLAM, and there also are frequent enough temporary outages and authentication problems through it. Your "commercial" grade third party ISP and static IP addresses drop significantly in price/quality value because of this.

Passing through Bell's DSLAM means that you get a crappy PPPoE service, which may be throttled or interrupted via the DSLAM as well as via the Bell IP network through which packets are relayed.

In cases where the service is unreliable enough to require repairs on the part of Bell, they'll make sure that you're not served in reasonable delays and to offer you their own service. They'll blame your modem, your ISP, your hardware, your software and your wireing before even checking that the problem is at their DSLAM as you knew since the beginning, while you're feeding your ISP with enough technical proofs. Eventually your ISP will put enough pressure on Bell for it to have no choice but to fix the problem. But you're still waiting during all that time.

This is exactly what happened when for more than a month the internet connection was unusable at peak hours (afternoon to midnight) because of extreme congestion at a local DSL access point (a few bytes per second only passing through, slower than a 1200bps modem). After all the trouble and delays it was eventually "fixed" and this is when the throttling became noticeable. Since then, the service is 100% of the time at exactly 1mbps/512kbps which is much lower than the speed payed for. And it has been verified with other users of various third party ISPs in the locality that they also are getting the same ridiculous speed.

When istop.com was sold to cia.com, all the customers lines were functional and could easily have been switched to the new administration without tempering with the quality of the service. However, customers were all cut and offered Bell ISP services while they had to wait for weeks for their service to be activated again. This was not the first time IStop had problems with Bell.

Sympatico is partly M$ owned

And yes, Sympatico is partly owned by Microsoft. Let's not forget that. Another reason to prefer the competition.