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

On 2025-05-22 7:16 PM, Adam H. Kerman wrote:

Rhino <no_offline_contact@example.com> wrote:

Adam wrote:

 

- antennas can be lightning magnets which is a real issue if it's
mounted on your roof

 Every wire entering the house must be grounded. And yes, you might want
to run it through a surge protector.
 

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....

 That's what they called an installation on the block that any building
could be hooked up to.
 

I'd never heard that before. Our Verizon training apparently omitted that bit of jargon....

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....

 It's being returned to a different inventory than the one the installers
draw from.
 

I would have thought Bell could easily distinguish between older model used modems and the newer ones in both the installer trucks and their supply depots but maybe that's just me....

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.

 That's a weird scenario.
 

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!

 I didn't mean to bring you down.

You didn't; I was just empathizing with what you'd experienced.

Enjoy your excellent subscriber service
while you can!

I certainly plan to :-)
--
Rhino