 Review by tiredtechie 
UPDATED: 1.6 years ago
member for 4.8 years, 135 visits, last login: 1.5 years ago
 Toronto,ON
 $47 per month (12 month contract)
 about 10 days
 Bell Canada
 "Recommended for grandmothers that want to get on the internet, or other simple uses"
 "VPN connections are unreliable, Bittorrent is throttled, Customer Service and Tech. Support are terrible, Expensive, Caps on Ban"
 "Go elsewhere, if you can."
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
(ratings below consensus)
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Pre Sales information: The Bell website says that the Total Internet Performance service is available at my address which would give me a 7:1 Mbps internet connection. I live in a VDSL building, so that's impossible.
Install Co-ordination: When I had the service installed, I was told it would be installed on the Thursday when in fact they booked the service technician for Friday. The result was that two days of my life were wasted - not one. Bad co-ordination.
Connection reliability: VPNs connect intermittently, even at times of the day when Bell says their connection throttling is "off". Bell claims that throttling doesn't affect VPN services, but widespead reports of VPN problems are seen in the Sympatico & reseller forums.
Tech Support: I called for tech support and the person told me she could keep me on the line as long as I liked (at that point it was 1.5 hours into the call) but she couldn't fix the problem for me, and that no upper level support existed.
Services:
VPN connections are unreliable, Bittorrent is throttled, MSN-Sympatico Webmail doesn't even know how to handle Daylight Savings time. Bandwidth caps. NNTP servers don't even exist anymore.
Value for money: Sympatico has slowly and consistently cut everything good from its service. How sweet it is to have a monopoly! You can charge customers higher prices, reduce your services to them, and as for competition - what competition? With all the services that have been cut, and my subsequent cut in use of the internet, I'd like to switch to a cheaper service package. But going from a (so called) 7 Mbps service down to 1 Mbps is quite a jump. What a surprise, there's nothing available in between!
DP: Ready, set... GO!
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