Re: [OT] Bell Canada - service vs. abuse

On 2025-05-22 1:17 PM, Adam H. Kerman wrote:

Rhino <no_offline_contact@example.com> wrote:
 

. . .

 

I'm struck by the contrast between the quality of service I got vs. the
"service" - which seems more like abuse - that I hear about when Adam or
anim have to deal with *their* internet providers. Instead of getting
jerked around and having to always pay more, sometimes for less service,
I got more services for considerably less money.

 Even the phone company or the cable company may bend over backwards for
a new customer. You were being romanced.
 As an existing subscriber, you will soon learn that the honeymoon is
over.
 

I've been a Bell customer in the past many times for both phone and internet so I'm not under any illusions about how things will go in the future. Still, they really *do* seem like they've been cleaning up their act in recent years.
A few years ago, I helped a friend get his new Bell internet working but had trouble so ended up having to call Bell tech support myself. Having dealt with their tech support before, I expected a very long wait on hold and then barely (or not entirely) competent support. Much to my surprise, the IVR informed me that there was a long queue and offered to call me back at a number of my choosing at a time that was convenient for me. I jumped on that opportunity and arranged a callback for later that day since I had to attend a meeting of several hours and couldn't hang around on hold for fear of missing the meeting. They let me choose the time with no restrictions as I recall and called me on time. The support agent also seemed quite competent and I don't think I even had to try to understand a foreign accent so I soon had my friend up and running. That was when I first noticed a major attitude change from Bell.
By contrast, I still remember the nonsense the first time I went to Europe; it was 1983. I was going to be away for 5 weeks and I knew my phone bill was going to arrive somewhere in the middle of that so I called Bell to see if it was going to be a problem if I paid a few weeks late. I was told that I would very likely have my phone cut off if I didn't pay promptly upon receipt of the bill. (Billing was still entirely by mail in those days, as it still is today.) I asked what I should do then and she urged me to go to my local Bell PhoneCentre, which was a retail store in the mall where they mostly take orders for new phone service but could also take payments for bills. So I drove across town to pre-pay the bill. When I got there, I mentioned what the other woman had said and the woman processing the payment raised an eyebrow and dug up a printout with my payment history and scoffed that they never would have cut off my phone with my payment history!

Of course it isn't *always* that way in this country. Bell and its main
competitor Rogers used to be notorious for crappy service and
ever-increasing prices, just like American ISPs. But Bell at least seems
to have changed their attitude and is trying to win customers and keep
the ones they have. That's the way capitalism is *supposed* to work,
even if it doesn't always work out that way, especially in the
semi-monopolies like Internet and telecoms. (At least their
semi-monopolies in this country; in the US, not so much.)

 Exactly.
 Where I lived for close to twenty years, we had the bizarre experience
of being the first place in which the gas monopoly replaced underground
utilities (my block was literally first) and the hookup to the meter,
but just about the last to get anything like home *DSL from the local
Bell telephone company.

That *is* a bit surprising! When I did DSL support for Verizon, some of our customers were in New York and New Jersey and they often had REALLY old infrastructure, meaning telephone lines that had been installed in the 1930s and never upgraded since. This often meant their DSL was really crappy due to the ancient lines and switches. I had the impression then that Verizon never upgraded anything more than they absolutely had to. I felt sorry for the customers that were stuck in that situation. I'm guessing that Verizon simply couldn't be bothered to upgrade wires and switching stations because it would have been too expensive; they were probably anticipating that newer technology, like fiber optic, would eventually replace all that old copper wire based service.
I also felt bad for the customers who had to have a service call because the repair guys were often no-shows. I remember a call from one woman who'd been home waiting all day for the repair guy and he was a no-show again. It was the third full day she'd taken off work - unpaid, if I remember correctly - and she said she'd very likely be fired if she took off yet another day due to that day's no-show.

Once there was competition, I routinely switched
back and forth between cable (I had an outdoor antenna and excellent
sight lines to the antenna array on top of Hancock (point at Hancock and
you also receive signals from Sears) and the Bell telephone company. At
one point, Bell gave me a new drop and did inside wiring work. My
apartment still had a screw terminal! I got them to put the DSL signal
on the unused pair in the two-pair inside wiring because my cordless phone
interferred with the signal.
 

I haven't seen an outdoor antenna - or heard of anyone using one - in this country in a REALLY long time, probably since the 70s. I knew one woman who had been given a TV by her son but she couldn't afford cable or satellite so she watched only the one local channel that she could get. Then the station changed to a digital signal and she lost even that, making her TV an over-sized paperweight....

I lost satellite television via cable distribution but just didn't care.
 When the phone company pissed me off, I went back to cable. There was
another point I switched back to phone, but they wouldn't give me back
the DSL as they had done an FTTN installation in the block but it wasn't
the full-sized node delivering satellite via FTTN.
 I switched back to cable another time. I guess it was cable when I left.

One of my friends switched back and forth between Bell and Rogers internet regularly for years; maybe she still does. Both services had crappy quality, mostly because the wiring within her apartment building was in really horrid shape and the owners wouldn't upgrade it and Bell and Rogers couldn't or wouldn't. She arranged a number of service calls but they always hit the problem with the buildings wiring and could never get past that. But I guess the service was sufficiently passable most of the time that it wasn't sufficiently bad to get them to move.
--
Rhino