Review by Prelude76 
Posted: 356 days ago
member for 356 days, 19 visits, last login: a few hours ago
 Barrie,ON
 $29 per month (6 month contract)
 about 14 days
 "Good promotions and give free months is problems arise."
 "Customer Service, Reliability, Speeds, Expensive, and they lie to you."
 "Avoid at all costs. Might not be as bad as Rogers, but ANY other DSL is better!"
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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After being a DSL customer with LOOK DSL (for almost 2 years) and then Primus DSL (for 6 months), I decided to switch to Bell Sympatico for 2 reasons; a special 6-month long $24.95 + tax promotion, and my belief that since Bell Sympatico is the backbone of all DSL in Ontario, that they offer the best reliability and speeds and support. ha! oh how much I've learned these past 6 months.
For starters, the installation itself was a nightmare, which in the end resulted in them apologizing to me and giving me a free month right at the start. I had a D-Link modem that I owned, so I plugged it in, and no ADSL light. That means no service at all on my line. I call them up, and after doing 'advanced' lvl1 tech stuff like rebooting the modem and restarting the computer and checking the cable, the tech support said it probably doesnt work with D-Link, so I had to wait for my sympatico modem to arrive in the mail. Um, ok, annoying i'd be down for a few days, but ok, I'll bite. I waited, and once I got their Speedstream modem, still no ADSL light. Back on long hold to lvl1 support. Same drill, same troubleshooting (if you can call it that), and no answer. Oh, it must be the fact that I'm daisy-chaining the modem with my wireless router. Bell only supports THEIR wireless router, not 3rd party. Fine, fair enough, I took my router out of the equation, and had direct Speedstream to PC connection. Still no ADSL light. After an hour of going mental with the lvl1 tech, I finally got bumped up to lvl2, which took ANOTHER 30 minutes of hold. I had to go, so i hung up before lvl2 picked up. Next day, I go thru 30 minutes wait for lvl1 again, and I say to put me to lvl2 again, since i was supposed to talk to them and got tired of waiting, and the lvl1 weasel REFUSED to do that, and forced me to walk thru usual canned troubleshooting (which i just lied and pretended to do), and back on a 30 minute cue for lvl2. Finally talked to lvl2 tech who seems actually knowledgeable and didnt insult me with 'try you cable' and 'try resetting'. He actually CHECKED their end and found out that my account was still not active. But instead of fixing it, he rather argued with me that I must have put in a cancellation order, because there is no way it could be un-active unless I placed a cancellation. I told him I didnt place one, but that I was really tempted to after almost 10 days of this crap service and accusations. I finally got bumped up to lvl3 (yes, there is a lvl3) and in 30 seconds, the LVL3 guy told me someone accidentally unplugged my DSL card by mistake at my local DSL 'hub' or whatever its called, put in request to hook it back up ASAP, and issued Billing to give me a free month.
In 1 hour, my ADSL line was on and I was finally a customer. It only took almost 2 hrs of tech support over several days plus false accusations against me before they finally admitted to making a mistake. wow, what a great start.
Speeds were actually fast, for first 7 months of my service, hitting about 3 to 3.5 mb/s level. But randomly, I got disconnects, mostly at night, with several nights of several hour long outages when my DSL simply kept getting PPPOe failure after failure. They always blamed my lines and/or my phones, but I never get slow speeds or disconnects with other DSL providers at my house.
So after my 6 month promotion was over, I got quite annoyed about 3 things; first, the rates after promotion are $47! thats way too much for internet, IMO. second, I STILL got frequent, sometimes half-day long outages. and finally, 3 weeks ago, I noticed my bit torrent downloads got capped at about 40kb/s, while everything else worked full speed. Nice, I'm paying $47/month for unreliable, capped *unlimited* service. Screw you Bell, I'm outta here.
I'm signing up to Teksavvy. crossing my fingers that the list of super reviews on here is a good sign of things to come.
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