Canadian TV, Computing and Home Theatre Forums banner

How satisfied are you with this service provider?

  • Extremely Satisfied

    Votes: 41 25.8%
  • Somewhat Satisfied

    Votes: 45 28.3%
  • Somewhat Dissatisfied

    Votes: 27 17.0%
  • Extremely Dissatisfied

    Votes: 46 28.9%

Internet Service: Bell

31K views 23 replies 20 participants last post by  tvlurker 
#1 ·
The purpose of this thread is for Digital Home members to review and relay their experience with Sympatico Internet Service

This is NOT a discussion thread so please limit yourself to one post which includes your review.

We welcome the input and opinions of all members whether they are good or bad, however, please note that this thread is NOT for rants. Whether you had a good or bad experience with this vendor we want to hear about it but in an OBJECTIVE manner.

If you post a rant or childish comments like, these guys "suck" or they're all a "bunch of idiots", then your comments will be considered trolling and your post will be deleted.

When you post, please try to include the following information:

  • What product or service you purchased.
  • Approximate timeframe you ordered the product
  • What location you dealt with if it’s a company with many stores or service locations
  • Your overall level of satisfaction
  • If you had a positive experience, please explain what made it such a positive experience.
  • If you had a negative experience, please read our guidelines below.

Guidelines for Posting Negative Reviews

The truth is no retailer or service provider is perfect and occasionally even the best companies can disappoint. Our experience is that good companies have problems but they typically make every reasonable effort to resolve problems.

If you had a problem and are posting a negative review, then please note what efforts you made to resolve the problem and the feedback you received. If you think the efforts to resolve the problem were NOT reasonable then please explain why. Saying you phoned up and talked to some idiot, suggests the problem may lie with the consumer and NOT the company!

No posting URLS or Directs to Competitors will be deleted

Posts containing URL's to competitors or posts saying gee you should have shopped at this retailer will be considered spam and deleted.

We want opinions, NOT sales pitches or spam!
 
See less See more
#2 ·
I've had no shortage of negative experiences with them.

First, services were added on my bill that I never ordered. Not only that but it was a pain in the ass to get them taken off and credit me. Often I was passed from one department to another like a zombie even though I talked to their main customer service department.

Second, the time you have to wait for an appointment is ridiculous, even for new installs it's a week at the latest (and I was with them when their techs were on strike). Let's see what else, their phone service is ok. Their CSRs are too nice and really know how to kiss ass. However they should know the products offered by the competition better. For example, in one case, I called about my home telephone account. So the CSR started chit chatting with me and asked if I'd be interested in Sympatico. I told her "no thanks, I have Rogers" and she went "really?! what's up with that?" and I'm like wtf? Then she went on on how great Sympatico is even though I told her that Rogers is faster (at the time Rogers was offering a 5 mbits plan while Sympatico was only at 3 mbits, at least for residential, you could have signed up for their 4 mbits for business). Despite that her conclusion was Sympatico rules and I was like lay off the coffee lady.
 
#3 ·
I only have Sympatico dialup so I won't comment on the speed, it's just as fast as any dial-up connection this far away from where I connect to.

For the most part, reliability is good. When it works, it's great and doesn't cause me that many problems. When it doesn't work (which has happened a little too frequently recently), Aliant customer support couldn't care less and I just end up waiting for it to work again.
 
#4 ·
I have two HSE accounts (one at home in Sudbury, one at my apartment in Red Lake where I work). Both work flawlessly, and the one time I had to call technical support my problem was dealt with quickly and easily. I had to wait on hold to speak to someone about two minutes, which I feel is within reason.
 
#5 ·
Bell's DataValet public internet service

I recently experienced Bell DataValet high speed internet service in two hotels in Toronto. The first was wifi in the Radisson and the second was wired in the Quality Suites, both at Pearson Airport.

In the first instance, the wifi was not working and the DataValet tech support was superb in getting me operational in my room.

In both cases, there is a design problem. The service launches a separate window on a regular basis. This changes the focus to the new window without warning. So as you are typing, your keystrokes will be lost until you notice that this separate window has once again been given focus. The window is small in the upper right corner of the screen so does not usually cover your text input box. I stayed at these hotels for over two weeks and I found this design flaw especially irritating. Even emitting a sound when the focus switches would be an improvement. But the design is just bad

When I returned to the room and took my laptop out of hibernation, the results were inconsistent in re-establishing the internet connection. It usually worked but in 2 different ways: either it presented a Google screen in one of my active windows, or it presented its login screen and login was required to re-establish connectivity. The prior content of that window was lost in both cases.
 
#6 ·
Cold weather problems.

When the temperature drops below -15C my Sympatico connection becomes unstable. This is the second winter that I've experienced this problem. It started after I started using the 2Wire modem. Bell claims that cold temps don't impact connection reliability however my problem always coincides with the cold temps. Has anyone else had this type of problem?
 
#7 ·
Happy Customer

I had been a long-time customer of Bell with their 3Mbps "HSE" DSL/Voice/long distance package, and finally moved last fall to their Performance 6Mbps service with a separate voice package.

My experience with the transition to their Performance package was a little frustrating in that I didn't get the performance boost I expected until I complained to Tech Support several days after the switchover (or at least so it seemed to me).
However, once the upgrade had been implemented, I've been very pleased with the consistency and reliability of the service.
Download 5.9 - 6.1 Mbps
Upload 0.6 Mbps
I live in downtown-east Toronto in a small townhouse condo, so am close to the CO, and I believe we're on fibre almost to the house.
 
#8 ·
After over 20 years with Sympatico and now Bell Internet I have decided to call it quits.
They have changed. Many calls to customer service have resulted in the Bell mantra we can't do that. The last straw for me was "we changed you to ebill but we can't change you back". "You must go to our web page to tell us you do not want to be switched to ebill". As well the response to an incorrect bill "you must pay the total amout and we will credit your account next month". "Our system won't allow us to fix it".
Best of luck to them but their new customer service does not make up for the high cost of their product.
 
#9 ·
Happy Camper

Been with Bell for many years now. Their service is for the most part very good and reliable and their customer service acceptable. Of course, they are not perfect and I'm old and wise enough now to know that the grass is very rarely ever greener on the other side. I tried Vidéotron too and although customer service is marginally better I found the connection not to be as stable, didn't like the low usage caps and found them to be poorly connected to the rest of the Internet (they used transit mainly, not a lot of peering but maybe it's changed now).

I think some people have unrealistic expectations when it comes to ISPs, and think they should be treated like corporate customers who pay thousands per month for fast full duplex monitored Internet access... ;)
 
#10 ·
^^^^
Most of my experience with Bell (Sympatico) has been as a corporate customer or on behalf of a corporate customers. Even then there have been problems. One really horrible part of their serices is the help(???) desk. They have a script and stick to it. I've installed industrial grade routers connected to ADSL. When I have an issue they want me to click on the Start button and will not proceed with the call until I do so. The fact that this is a router and not a computer is not relevant. Now, I expect that perhaps the front line people may not be able to work with anything beyond Windows, so I should be able to escalate to the next level. No go. They refused to and even hung up on me when I insisted on speaking to 2nd level or a supervisor. The customer finally called the sales rep and told them to get the problem resolved or cancel. The sales person was able to get me a number in Montreal, where I could work with someone who knew what they were doing. Again, this was for a corporate customer. I have not had this sort of problem when dealing with other parts of Bell. I have had other such experiences with Sympatico at other customers in providing service. On another occasion, I was helping a neighbour get going on Sympatico. None of the 4 ADSL modems they sent out worked and the last one even killed the phone line. That neighbour then switched to Rogers for internet and I had her up & running in no time.
 
#11 ·
James, IMO anything DSL based should be considered mass-market, even if you are a corporate customer. What I really meant was services such as fractional fast-ethernet or gig-ethernet, DS3 etc... On those services, Bell will probably know that you service is down before you do... ;) (of course, they are priced accordingly)
 
#12 ·
^^^^
Quite so. I have worked on circuits, up to DS3 and even dark fibre from Bell, Telus & Allstream. However, some customers go with ADSL or cable modem. It's their choice, not mine. But you'd think that if Bell is providing ADSL service to their corporate customer, they'd provide a help desk that can actually do something for them. A help desk in India, that's geared for home users (and pretty poorly at that) is not suitable for corporate customers. Also, the work I did for Bell customers was on sub-contract from Bell, so it's Bell's own customers that suffer from the poor ADSL help desk.

Even with the other connections, it can be "fun". In Sept 2008, I was setting up a system, over ISDN, between Calgary and Vancouver, with Telus the carrier. I had no problem setting up the Calgary end, but the Telus techs in Vancouver tried telling me they couldn't do what I needed. After a while of that, I told them to look at what was done at Calgary and do the same in Vancouver. I finally got to the point where they were able to provide 112 Kb/s, instead of the specified 128 K, but that was good enough for that job. I could tell you another story about setting up a system at the Hydro control centre in Mississauga, but I'll save that for another time.
 
#13 ·
Signed up for Wimax service when it originally was rolled out in St. Clair Township 2 years ago. One of the first subscribers Inside Modem with 5/5 lights to original tower SE of my home within 7Km's
In the last 5 months the speed and quality have declined dramatically
Repeated calls to help desk about this.
I have been told to switch towers to a tower 180 degrees from the SE as it is congested. Service on second tower NW is 2-3/5 and bandwidth is no better
PingTest has same jitter issues
This weeks call to Help Desk the analyst was down right ignorant. " There are other services in your area" Have been told for 5 months now that the towers are being upgraded
$55.00 per month for at times 50kbps download service is just wrong when I am paying for 3Mb download. Have recieved two months credits for service but how about they just do the upgrade.
Just a bit frustrated with Bell Wimax Help Desk and the planning group
 
#14 ·
i've got bell high speed internet and i am extremely satisfy so far. The only thing is when they try to sell you something, they don't mention that if you upgrade to "super high speed" that it will cost you 25$ more just to upgrade!!!! I bet they forget to mention to their clients so they could have a sale.
 
#15 ·
I have had Bell landline and internet for over 10 years now. While the service itself, once up and running, is very reliable (which is why I continue to be a customer), dealing with their help desk/ support/ billing is an absolute nightmare.

Over the 10 years, I moved from dial-up to high-speed to HS-basic plus I also moved houses a couple of times.

Each change of speed resulted in losing all my email addresses and having to set up new ones.

Each change of address resulted in a painful transition and startup issues. In the house I'm currently in, it took over two weeks (and being fortunate in getting a Canadian who gave me their local number for follow up calls) to get the issue resolved. Their tech support has to be the absolute worst I've seen.
 
#16 ·
Reliable enough for me

I've had Bell internet and phone since I moved to Canada five years ago. I've moved house once in that time and added/removed services several times, and I've never had any major problems with them. The worst that's happened was a recent internet outage that Bell claimed was a system outage, but turned out to be my modem which had failed. Once that was identified, the rep helped me set up a direct IP connection on my PC (I work from home so this was really important), and there was a new modem on my doorstep the next morning. Swapped it out, and all was well again.

Bell may not be the end all for technological bells and whistles, but for customer service and reliability, they've got Big Red beat by far. Planning on switching to Fibe now that's available in my area, and if they could give me a target date for Fibe TV, I'd be counting the seconds until I could ditch cable.
 
#17 ·
Continuing Happy Customer

I had been a long-time customer of Bell with their 3Mbps "HSE" DSL/Voice/long distance package, and finally moved last fall to their Performance 6Mbps service with a separate voice package.
Upgraded to the 5MB upload boost and Fibe 12 last week:
Technician was knowledgeable and very helpful during installation of Cellpipe 7130 modem
Currently getting 12Mb download and 6.9Mb upload with no issues.

Fiber has recently been laid to the box about 800 metres up the street, with existing copper to the TH condo.
Their service is not cheap ($59/month for month-by-month contract), but I'm getting the quality and speed I hoped for.
 
#18 ·
wimax sucks

Ive had wimax going on 3 years now i see these posts are 2 years old i tried callin the customer support number but it was all in french anyways i still live out in the country with no DSL and i just went to speedtest.net on my computer withe the wimax modem and it said my download speed was .3mbs and my upload was .6 mbs so i tried it on my rogers iphone 4 app on 3G it downloaded at 2 mbs and uploaded at 1 mbs now i know now rogers has got the rocket and bell has that new netgear turbo hub sayin it c`an go up to 21 mbs and rogers just to 7.2 mbs but rogers has a monthly max out of $100 it doesnt matter if u use 100GB but bells is 10GB for $75 and 10 cents a Mb after i know 4G is suppose to be comin out for xplornet this summer in my area and rogers $G sometime this fall or winter but what i was thinking of doing since i already bitched at bell and there giving me 3 free months of wimax is order the Turbo hub and just use it for gaming during the day and the wimax during the day for browsing and anytime after 2am using the wimax because ive heard of ppl gettin $700 bill with that new Turbo hub i dont know wat it is to break the contract though when the new 4G comes out i want that asap with rogers im kinda scared with explornet ive heard some horror stories about them maybe if i have the wimax and turbo hub bell might even give me a break but if not im going to rogers there offering me 3 months free unlimited use not satisfied return and by that tim e my 3 months of wimax should b used up and ill just wait for 4G or DSL my neighbour has DSL but i just cant pick up his wifi signal cuz we were gunna split the bill whens the misery gunna end like rogers gives me 6GB a month on my Iphone for$30 so sometimes i tether that to my PS3 during the day but besides that my internet is pointless between the hours of 9am til midnight
 
#19 · (Edited)
Mark me as extremely dissatisfied.

I purchased the 4 month promo from dell as my commitments with videotron are up this month and I was curious whether it would be worth it to switch.

This was less than a month ago, since then:
I have had to place over a half dozen calls to CSR's (3 different instances where I was getting billed) who in the process would transfer me to seperate groups and 3 seperate e-mails.
to summarize my issues: I was installed with Fibe7 when it should have been Fibe16. When I called Bell to correct it this began my spiral into the endless calls to bell.
The amount of people I had to deal with for such a trivial issue makes me understand why Bell has to charge so much for their internet.

It concluded today when bell tried to convince me that my 4 month promo was up until I mentioned that the modem and dry loop was not physically installed until the end of january which would make it a little difficult to be using their web :eek:

So I have now cancelled my "free" internet 3 months early as it is not worth the pain of dealing with them

sorry for that rant....
 
#20 ·
Have since switched to Teksavvy but 'was' dissatisfied. Towards the end my net kept going off and on, would cut out each time someone buzzed our apartment and would take sometimes more than ten minutes to come back on :rolleyes: plus not one month did they apply the bundle discount, had to call every month for the year to get it applied and got the same old story every month "it will be fixed next month" blah blah blah .. never was and in fact just got off the phone with them for my last bundle discount for Feb.

Won't miss them :p
 
#22 ·
my net kept going off and on, would cut out each time someone buzzed our apartment and would take sometimes more than ten minutes to come back on
That is due to a poorly designed building telecom unit. I had a similar problem at one time. It cost over $100 to have a separate line hooked up to bypass the building telecom. It should be possible to design apartment telecoms that do not interfere but many predate DSL. OTOH, it should not take 10 minutes to resync. That could be another issue.
 
#23 ·
Unlimited: As Bell continues to charge more, I'll use more

Fortunately, I was lucky to have an unlimited account with bell, even though the charges went from $64.35 to $70 and then again to $73.39 less than 6 months. I realize Bell is unhappy about people like myself who played by the rules they initially set up and now enjoy unlimited access...:(

I have never ever received notification from Bell about anytime it's decided to up it's rates...guess I'm not important enough to them, lucky I check my bills in advance, that's the only way I discovered it going up this month

I was quite happy that with my average usage being approximately 160GB/month, however when Bell has upped it's rates, I decided to up my usage, Since they charged me more, I've decided to use more.

As it went up to $70 - my usage went up to 500GB to 1TB

If my calculations are right under the new pay schemes for FIBE and such I would be paying 5x or more than my current bill for my usage.

I guess under the circumstances I'm getting my monies worth.:cool:
 
This is an older thread, you may not receive a response, and could be reviving an old thread. Please consider creating a new thread.
Top