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

On 2025-05-22 4:39 PM, Adam H. Kerman wrote:

Rhino <no_offline_contact@example.com> wrote:
 

. . .

 

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.

 Public utlities in that part of the country were notorious for failure
to keep up with post WWII population increases. The old infrastructure
was truly high quality when first installed, but was never intended to
serve subsequent population growth.
 

It's far from the first time that something that was intended to work for x years was used for MUCH longer than intended without spending money on maintenance....
I shudder to think how many roads and bridges we have that are past their best before date. We have an especially bad problem with that in our country's military. We've been running helicopters from the 1950s for decades past their intended life; I *think* they are gradually getting replaced but I'm not positive. We recently agreed to replace the pistols that were available to our soldiers: they were made in the 1930s!! The need for newer pistols was blindingly obvious a LONG time ago but our government (regardless of which party was in power) ALWAYS finds money for the military last (if they find money at all). Our current jet fighters are F-18s which are 40 years old and they're being held together (figuratively) with spit and bailer twine. The Conservatives, when they were last in power, agreed to buy a bunch of F-35s but as soon as the Liberals got in, they decided to revisit the decision, then spend almost 10 fucking years hemming and hawing before finally deciding to buy F-35s anyway. Now Carney is talking about pausing that order after all and going with a European fighter, just because Trump. (We've committed to buying a handful of F-35s but they're talking about taking the rest of the order away from the US and giving it to the Eurofighter people which would be extra, extra stupid because then we'd have a handful of F-35s and then a bunch of the Eurofighters causing all kinds of complications in terms of basing, maintenance, training, etc. etc. But the Liberals are nothing if not stupid so I'm ready for anything.) But I digress....

I'm going to rant here. There is lots of bandwidth in a twisted-pair
(the twist mitigates against antenuation) copper pair. After all, PRI
ISDN used a single copper pair, 23 B channels and one D channel. It was
set up with evenly-divided channels, 64 Kbps each. A B channel could be
used for voice or data; the D channel was for signalling. In typical
installations, it was either for voice or data. BRI ISDN was another
option. Genuine T1 was also done with a single copper pair.
 Except for businesses with PBXs, we didn't use ISDN for residential.
It's too bad because the sound quality was superior to analog but the
technology was in wider-spread use in Europe and Japan than here.
 We would have had widespread residential data connection much earlier
with easier implementation and no voice modems. ISDN was switched
technology, which meant it used the telephone network AND the telephone
network switch at the phone company central office. *DSL, which
attempted to use channels within the telephone lines without
interferring with the voice signal (sometimes unsuccessful without using
a separate pair), was unswitched. There was a separate piece of
equipment at the central office and, because signal distance was
limited, there had to be nodes set up in the field in order to serve the
entire polygon wired to a particular central office.
 

One of my friends built a house back when the internet was in its infancy and he installed ISDN. But I seem to recall that when he showed it to me, it was rather limited in speed to 128 MB, only twice as fast as the typical dialup modem in those days. If that's the best you can do with ISDN - and perhaps it's not - I'm underwhelmed even if it has other strengths.

Fiber optic was installed as a SEPARATE network because it got around
regulatory rules that court decisions had forced wholesale rates onto
the monopoly telephone network so there could be competition for *DSL
from companies that couldn't possibly afford to build out their own
networks for the last mile connection. Most network interchange actually
takes place at central offices.
 

There's a claim - I suspect it's a myth but I could be wrong - that every street in this country has fibre optic cable down the middle. More likely, every new street constructed after a certain point in time - probably in the 1970s - has fibre as a matter of course. I don't see them ripping up every existing street across this vast country to install fibre.

Cable was almost always built out as a separate network based on coax.
CableLABs has done amazing engineering over the years of squeezing out
fantastic amounts of bandwidth from the concept of coax.
>

I remember going to a friend's place when most people (including me) still had dialup modems. He had a cable modem and was getting 1 GB of speed; he could download a huge file in a couple of minutes. Meanwhile, I had to download updates to my compiler, put them on floppy disk, and the files were so numerous that I had to spend an entire weekend (48 hours) downloading the damned things on my dialup modem. That really opened my eyes to the capabilities of cable modems. But, in those early days, I also learned that if you had a cable modem, you shared your bandwidth with your whole neighbourhood; when you tried to download in prime time (after everyone was home for work and before bedtime) speeds dropped back down to almost dialup speeds. I know they've done a lot to get around those initial issues though; when I had a cable modem about 10 years back, I got very decent speed and didn't find it slowing down in prime time.

There's nothing wrong with old infrastructure

Then why were there so many problems in New York and New Jersey?

and, furthermore, there
never should have been separate copper and fiber-optic networks. Copper
should have been replaced as needed.
 

You know what we are doing in this country? Telephone repair personnel
have been ordered to leave covers off pedestals. You see this all over
the place. The covers were designed to eliminate water infiltration. But
the network isn't deteriorating quickly enough to make the business case
to the regulators that it must be abandoned, so the telephone companies
are helping things along with self sabotage. It's outrateous.
 

I've seen that here too and was puzzled by it. It never occurred to me that it was a deliberate act by the telcos. That is some shameful shit!

. . .

 

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....

 In the United States, the broadcast signal uses a significantly wider
bandwidth than what's distributed by cable. I don't know how adequate
broadcast is where you live.

I truly don't know. We certainly don't have nearly as many TV stations as you do! It's quite common for major cities there to have all kinds of stations serving them. Here, many cities in our top 20 cities limped along with a single station for many many years and the station from the next major city was often poor if you could get it at all. I think that's why we invented cable TV - or so we claim - and why that shaped our broadcasting for a long time. Even today, my home town still has only 1 TV station but with cable or satellite, you can get a lot more. When I was a kid, before we got cable, we could only get our local channel and the Hamilton channel reliably; the London channel was hit or miss and we couldn't get the Toronto channel except perhaps in rare circumstances.

I sure have never understood reluctance to
use an antenna if that's an option. Yes, I am aware of signals being
blocked by natural features and tall buildings.
 

I can think of a few issues with antennas:
- they can be a challenge to mount if you do it yourself
- if you get a tower for your antenna, it can be pretty expensive
- antennas can be lightning magnets which is a real issue if it's mounted on your roof

. . .

 

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.

 That was a regulatory issue in the United States to break the telephone
monopoly. The neighborhood service line and the drop remained the
property of the phone company. The point of demarcation was the outside
wall of the building.
 Inside the building, there can be multiple owners. If it's a
multi-tenant building, the building owns the wire, but the portion of
the wire unique to a tenant space belongs to the tenant. Who fixes what
is a game of finger-pointing.
 

That's what happened to my friend, time and time again.

I supervised the telephone installation in the last office the School
had. We could only get *DSL from the phone company. Cable hadn't lit lit
the building

Somethings tells me you meant to use a different verb since cable doesn't involve lighting....

and we were required to sign CONTRACTS with the cable
company for them to survey, before deciding to light the block, even
though they had no intention of lighting the block for years.

Wait, maybe you did mean "lit"! I've just never heard that verb used in the context of cable before....

No
contract? They wouldn't conduct a site survey. Since they had no
intention of providing service, what the hell was I signing a contract
for?
 

Good point.

The phone company scheduled a four-hour appointment for us, which I
couldn't understand. Well, soon, I found out. It took hours for him to
find the copper pair in the office. Nothing in the wiring closet was
adequately labeled.

Labelling is one of my pet peeves, even with my own house. (I'm gradually sticking labels on every switch and outlet to indicate what circuit breaker it is on so that I can turn off ONLY the correct breaker the next time I want to work on that switch or receptacle.)

I pointed to an outlet but it turned out that that
outlet was merely daisy chained from another part of the office. We
moved furniture and boxes and finally spotted another outlet that was
also the terminating point of the copper pair. With a buzzer, he
identified it at the wiring closet and then connected it to an unused
pair in the building wiring. Fortunately no new wiring was needed but
the time it took to identify the wiring path was the reason the
appointment window was so long.
 

I don't envy the installers. I'm sure most people underestimate the amount of work they'll have to do. I have a 4 hour window for my installation tomorrow and the email says they'll need three hours, even though I'm already wired for fibre and the connection works fine. I'm guessing they'll upgrade the little boxes they've got but whether they need to do that to get me my new speed, I really don't know.
I'm a little surprised they don't let the installer take the old modem with him but that's apparently against policy so I have to take it down to the post office and mail it from there using a special code to get free postage. Seems like extra work on their part with no obvious benefit to them....

Before the installer arrived, someone in the back office called me all
concerned that the wrong suite number was on the account's service
address. I told him that I didn't want to deal with it before
installation for fear that they'd disconnect the circuit that had to be
live during installation. They assured me that it wouldn't be. They
lied. Fortunately, the installer knew whom to call to get it turned back
on. The circuit merely had to be live to the building's basement.
Everything else was just making physical connections within the
building.
 That was quite painful.
 

It certainly sounds like it!

Even though we moved a block away, we crossed a magic boundary and
couldn't keep the old phone number.

By contrast, my mother didn't move at all and STILL had to give up her old phone number. Apparently Bell was taking that exchange out of service - it was the oldest in town - so she had to get a new number. Luckily, she didn't care and it didn't mess her up at all. I don't know what they did about businesses on that exchange; some of them must have had major objections to their numbers changing due to the costs of changing signage, advertising, business cards, etc....

The office admnistrator wanted
magicJack and failed to follow through with them to get the old phone
number ported (which could have happened prior to its disconnection at
the previous office). So the temporary phone number magicJack gave us
was our permanent phone number for five years.
 magicJack was a terrible company. It was incredibly difficult finding
anybody who understood what they had to do on their end for networking.
I ended up getting the old phone number restored and then porting it to
a new service, then porting out the "temporary" magicJack number to a
new service after an incredibly painful process that required to file
a complaint with FCC. In the meantime, because magicJack had failed to
mark the number as ported out, they assigned it to a new subscriber who
found he couldn't receive any phone calls! That took a great deal of
correspondence to fix as well.

Sounds like a nightmare!
--
Rhino