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Review by Rastan 
UPDATED: 326 days ago
member for 1.4 years, 179 visits, last login: 3 days ago
 Canada
 $47 per month (month by month)
 about 10 days
 Bell Canada
 "None"
 "They throttle your entire connection, expensive, bandwidth caps, tech support"
 "Stay away from this company."
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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I've been a Bell Sympatico customer since 2003 (I actually had to look that up... it's been that long) and I've stayed with them because they've been pretty reliable. The problems started late last year. They claimed it was a network problem that caused severe congestion. During this time I could barely even browse the Internet during peak hours. I used the word "claimed" because Bell management and employees have a history of being dishonest and outright lying to customers.
They've been throttling P2P apps for the past few months. When it started, many people reported their experiences on the Bell forum but they were called misinformed and were told that Bell does not throttle. I guess these people were vindicated when Bell finally owned up to it and admitted that they throttle.
I'm now effected by the throttling as well. At first the max speeds I could get varied from anywhere between 30kB/s to 100kB/s. Now it's capped at 30kB/s 24 hours/day. I left torrents running overnight to test it and they still have not completed downloading.
In addition to throttling P2P, if you have a P2P app running you won't be able to play games online at the same time. This is because they throttle your entire connection once they determine that you're using P2P. It doesn't matter if you cap speeds in your P2P client either. When I play games online I always cap my P2P download to 75kB/s & upload to 10kB/s just so that I won't have any problems with online gaming. Bell has now decided to cripple everything so that nothing will work.
Their tech support isn't good but I've never had to call them often. Their billing system often causes to be overcharged or double billed. I know several people who have experienced this.
Bell consistently offers less and less. They've taken it upon themselves to cripple file transfers and any other traffic that's being used while a P2P app is running. They do this despite having a healthy network.
Their job is to provide an Internet connection but instead they've succeeded in providing a crippled Internet connection. $50/month in exchange for 30kB/s is simply not worth it. Don't fall for their sales pitch either.
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