at least they’re being creative
My Bell woes are well-documented. It’s never fun dealing with them, but there are few other choices for some of the services I want, like DSL.
Recently, they were upgrading DSL services, moving their 1.5 megabit customers up to 3 megabit for no charge, and we 3-meg customers up to a nice 4.5 megabits. I was quite looking forward to it.
First, they did the 1.5→3.0 upgrade, and apparently that didn’t work exceptionally well, so they reverted those customers to 1.5. Except, whoops, they took all the existing, premium-paying customers with them. What a crock.
What a crook is more like it. Go cable, it won’t hurt as much. Trust me. Have I ever lied to you before?
Umm…. cable sucks.
Go iStop. You won’t regret it. You know who I work for, so you know I speak the gospel truth.
Oh, no, I don’t use Bell as my service provider. I have [EI Catalyst][eicat] for that. But they, and I strongly suspect iStop, are at the mercy of Nexxia’s incompetence for the last mile.
Cable is not an option, mainly because there is no choice of ISPs, rather than just compromised choices.
First, they did the 1.5->3.0 upgrade, and apparently that didnt work exceptionally well, so they reverted those customers to 1.5.
I was wondering why things hadn’t improved at all for me (not that I’d complain about a ‘free’ upgrade)… Is this documented somewhere?
Heh - they are indeed at the mercy of Bell as pipe provider. There’s no such thing as Nexxia anymore, as they’ve been rolled back into the mothership by order of the CRTC (it’s fascinating how this org is used as a weapon by all the players, and the only real loser across the board is the customer - but hey, we knew that already).
Bell is actively expanding the DSL footprint and line speeds, and is in the process of upgrading COs where it can. Everything was supposed to be finished last month, but they’re behind schedule, and if the technician’s strike goes through in a few weeks don’t expect any more upgrades to be completed until that’s over with.
I’m waiting for my CO to be upgraded as well, although I’m pretty happy with the service I get today. It’s not super fast, but it’s definitely consistent, and is more than double the speed of what I had with Rogers.
I have had cable internet access in NC, Montreal and now Kingston and have had no problems with my phone reception (!), nor with inadvertent or otherwise changes to my service.
You do let them deliver those premium television channels to you, do you not? Had a lot of problems with that recently? ;)
I have had cable internet in Minneapolis and New York, and had very few complaints with the services there. The speeds were fast, the pipes almost always available (in Minn. it was amazing), and I had static IPs. So I guess I should be more specific - I think Rogers cable net connects suck.
Getting a half meg down on a good day and around 96kbs up for the prices they charge just wasn’t worth it, and I found that the network went down at least once a month. I’m not so big on their tv services, either, so have managed to separate myself from them completely. The nice thing about bundles is you realize just how much money you’re paying for TV.
I’m with ExpressVu for TV now, but I really miss my DirecTV. I haven’t had a non-user-related (me) issue with my DSL connection and phone service yet touches wood (and who knew those line filters only worked one way, anyways? ;) ).
It’s best to stick with what you’re happy with, and I gotta say I’m happy with iStop. I had a routing issue last week, and the tech knew what I was talking about when I described the proble, and was able to fix my problem without reading from a script and making me do the reboot and reinstall everything dance.
Bell has gotten better, but they also tend to be graded on a higher scale than anyone else because they do phone so well. (biased opinion)
ok, babbling now. must stop.
Okay, I can’t comment on Rogers, since I haven’t had internet access from them. But Cogeco, Videotron and Roadrunner all provided exceptionally reliable service. I have only twice had memorable outages in the almost 2 years I’ve been with Cogeco and once it was the whole web that was down.
Also, DSL is not yet available in as many places as cable - at least not out here in the boonies.
I can’t wait until we get off the wire for all of this and can have some real competition in the market.