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Review by ned4 
Posted: 10.1 years ago
member for 10.1 years, 0 visits, last login: 10.1 years ago
 undisclosed location
 Contract price not specified.
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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I signed up nearly immediately when Sympatico first started offering ADSL service to Toronto. From start to finish the reliability was horrendous to say the worst. I would say there were at least a dozen outages that lasted more than 2 hours and sometimes it was as long as 2-3 days before service was finally restored.
I finally decided to cancel when my service had been out for an entire week and all the tech support could say was "we have contacted the network people to check your case but it may be another week before it's fixed". I work online so basically this was unacceptable and I told them go to hell and cancelled the service. For the piece' du resistance they not only cancelled my ADSL service, they also turned off my regular phone service and that took 5 days to restore.
Not only that but the refund they promised for the downtime was never credited to my credit card bill.
Here are some of the specific problems with Sympatico HSE.
1)web proxy: this is mandatory and worked ok usually but often it crashed leaving the users with no way of browsing the web. Many times the proxy got so overloaded that speeds dropped to horrendous levels (0-2kb/sec) regardless of the site visited. If a company is going to force its users to use a proxy it had better well be reliable and fast.
2)severe packetloss: this mainly affected gaming and made games like quake and half-life basically unplayble during the day. Pings would be low to servers but the packetloss was so bad that a ping of 50 felt like 5000. At night this went away (12-6 am).
3)hard coding: many inconsiderate users set their IP's manually even though sympatico is a DHCP service. The problem here is that if another user gets the IP that some jerkoff is hard coding then both people get disconnections and screwups. This happened to me 3 times and Sympatico could neither do anything to solve the problem and also said it would not take any real action against the perpetrators.
4)4 hour leases: this incredibly short lease period would have been fine IF the DHCP servers were reliable. However, they crashed often and if they were down when you needed to renew the lease, you were screwed.
5)DNS servers crashing: basically without the DNS server you can't do much of anything unless you happen to know all of the real IP addresses behind all of the hostnames. Sympatico had no backup servers and often these servers would crash for hours at a time.
6)ill chosen hardware: the sympatico modems are the lame 960kbit downstream (good speed) and a measely 120kbit upstream (very very bad). This made things like sending large files to friends basically impossible and made things like Video Conferencing impossible. Not only that but due to the asynchronous nature of the modems, if you sent a file to someone while downloading, your download speed would plummet such that your overall speed would be approximately 15kb/sec up/down at the same time.
7)horrible tech support: getting through to tech support took anywhere from 10-45 minutes and was totally useless when you did. Most of the time they would just try to blame you even when it was in fact their fault. They were generally quite naive regarding computers and never offered any real help with problems.
8)bad news server: the news server was certainly fast but messages had an odd tendency to dissappear just a day later from the server. Many times only certain threads would get lost and you'd end up getting about 10% of the messages that should have been there.
9)1 email address: only 1 email address and the password could not be changed. There was no way of getting additional email addresses so anyone with a family that needed several accounts would have to resort to garbage like Hotmail and Rocketmail.
10)laughable webpage: you had to request your webspace and even when they finally allocated it (took weeks sometimes), you could only have 25 megs of traffic per month! before additional charges were added. Totally ridiculous.
11)constant disconnections: as well as the longer outages, there were countless short outages that would only last a few minutes. For anyone that uses IRC you can imagine what a hassle this is.
After this huge array of problems I finally switched to cable modem. In 2 months I've had no downtime, no outages, I get 5 email addresses and instantly accessible webspace. The speeds are generally much higher, the upstream is nearly quadruple (50kb/sec) and uploading does not affect download speeds.
For anyone living in an area serviced by cable modem and sympatico ADSL I suggest avoiding the DSL like the plague.
Email me if you have any other concerns.
Followup comments: | Forums » comments on review of Bell Sympatico |
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Review by JamesEPatterson
Posted: 10.1 years ago
member for 10.1 years, 2 visits, last login: 8.1 years ago
undisclosed location
Contract price not specified.
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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Overall, ADSL service is GREAT compared to dialup access we previously had.
However, we signed up to what we thought would be DHCP service. We didn't know that Sympatico was in the process of rolling out PPPoE service (PPP over Ethernet), which is much less flexible especially for "non-supported" operating systems. I'm a beta user of Windows 2000, but I have been forced to use Windows 95 because PPPoE currently does not run on that platform.
The only serious disruption we've had in our area was a long disruption of over 20 hours a few days back. It was hard to verify that there actually was a disruption, though. Their "announce" newsgroup mentioned it only half a day after it went down, and when I called the support desk they first had me verify my DHCP settings and were in the process of having me search for WINSOCK dlls before they admitted that there was a service disruption in some areas.
The only "supported" platforms for Sympatico are Windows 95/98 and Macintosh 7.6 or higher. To their credit, Sympatico does provide access software for NT 4.0 and (open source) Linux. That's about all they will do for you if you're on one of these other platforms, though.
Overall, I'll put up with the poor service to get the extra speed, and it's really not costing me any more when I factor in the savings of the second phone line that I'm having disconnected. Over time, I think this PPPoE stuff will sort itself out, just like PPP did a few years ago.
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Review by gtomkins
Posted: 10.3 years ago
member for 10.3 years, 1 visits, last login: 9.1 years ago
Kanata,ON
Contract price not specified.
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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SYMPATICO HSE (High Speed Edition) from Bell Canada
Pricing (from August 1st)
$29.95 CDN per month plus $15 modem rental ($10 if you subscribe to Bell Canada long distance)
Using Nortel Networks 1Meg modem splitterless ADSL (Presently using limited to 1060k, but are now installing 1.5M versions on new installs (Line card end still presently capped at 1M)
installation varies from $50 self install to $200.
Supported service for Macintosh and Windows users. Supply
d-link NIC for windows users. No support for Linux, although users not prevented.
Presently IP is supplied using a DHCP server, but from August through to October, they are moving to a PPPoE access rumoured (Strong) to be from Redback Networks (this is to enable Bell to offer ADSL to mutiple ISP's)
Speed is farily constant provided you are not on the margin for distance to CO. I have seen top d/l speeds of 109kB/sec and routinely get above 100k on good sites.
Annoyances. use of forced proxy on port 80 (http) this has caused many problems (On line banking, SETI) and they are very slow at implementing exceptions. Just announced that they are moving to a tranparent proxy.
In 6 months have had only one extended outage, technical support was lousy (Needed to convince non Mac technical people that I did not need to re-install my system software on all 3 Mac's etc.??) turned out to be something at the linecard/DSLAM end - no info as to what was being done. Technical support is usually 5-30 minutes wait, and is fairly useless.
Get 5hrs free dial-up per month.
Newsgroup server seems pretty good and has been reliable over the past 6 months. Good internal HSE newgroup that is fairly active, (S/N ratio is begining to degrade as user base increases). Client base is estimated at 25k as of July 99.
Competing with Rogers@home on price and service.
Biggest issue is the lack of interaction that user has with Bell/Sympatico. Very limited activity on internal newsgroup, poor internal usage of there announcement newsgroup web pages. When there are problems users are left in the dark, or there is some useless announcement. No discussion groups or prior knowledge concerning key issues (eg Forced proxy and introducing exceptions, the change from DHCP IP to PPPoE.)
Followup comments:  Wulfgar1
join:2007-06-23
| question Hello everyone, i got a question to clear out
I've been using sympatico for 4 years now. at start i was paying 25 bucks for a year for the high speed service. then it went to 30 since since i asked them to keep me billed at 25 but we made an agreement for 5 bucks more, same service. now i'm paying about 35 bucks.
at first i was living in an appartment with poor telephone line connexion and got rates of abou 150 kb/s to max 200 when downloading throught torrents. average was about 80-100 in most cases.
i recently moved to a house in laval and now i'm getting max 550-600, rarely, and an average of 200-250, even lower but it never goes under 100 kb/s.
I dont get any lag in games and i'm mostly satisfied, never got any probs but i'm thinking that dl speed is not enought. i\ve seen speeds of 1 mb/s at rogers at a friend's house and i dont wanna pay for a service i dont get. what should i do since my contract goes null this summer ? change to another provider or stay with sympatico ? also i dont wanna get limits on download. and what would the optimal torrent/internet download speed for a high speed service at 40 bucks ? | |
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