Review by OLDDarwin 
Posted: 9.8 years ago
member for 10 years, 21 visits, last login: 7.1 years ago
 North York,ON
 $39 per month
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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Well, after my first months with Bell Sympatico HSE (Ontario), I'm glad to say that things have FINALLY begun to work themselves out. I think one of the biggest problems here is that there isn't sufficient phone line checks done before a customer signs up. From what I've heard, Bell doesn't do too much more than take a quick glance at your postal code before they activate your account (especially if you ordered from their website).
Installation/Tech:
My first month was pretty bad, 300kb/sec was the max I'd ever get, but more often than not, things would drop to 70kb/sec. This was a far cry from the 1 Mbps potential. Tech support didn't help much accept give the old re-hash of re-installing drivers. Each one of them, with their different point of view (which sometimes is TOTALLY wrong). What bugged me the most was that I was told 300kb/sec is a minimum guaranteed speed and nothing could be done. ANother story I liked was one lady telling me my "distance to the CO was irrelevant. It does not affect your speed".... ummm ok....
But my some miracle, I finally dialed into a tech support guy who knew something. He agreed that something should be done and moved me up to the Network guys to perform physical line checks. It took them nearly a week, but they found out there was a problem with the cabling and replaced it. Ends up I was pretty close to the CO anyways. Now everythings FAST and CONSISTENT, as I get around 700-880kbps. So my overall impression is that you have to blast your way through the wall of bad phone support, in order to get to the real GOOD tech guys. I think it's just kinda too bad that they didn't see this problem BEFORE I subscribed, but I give credit to the networking departing for fixing it.
**oh and a note: It seems the wait for tech support has been DRASTICALLY reduced... I got thu in a couple of minutes or so. But quantity is not always better than quality!**
Misc:
Access Manager for some reason hasn't caused me too much grief... even when using sygate. I think I got lucky and it worked on my first try. But be warned, a lot of other ppl have expressed major headaches. Haven't used the email or news too much so I can't comment. Can't complain too much now that everything's stable, so a good value IF it works like it's supposed to!!
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