pcbrand
join:2003-03-25
| Unbiased log of my new-customer experience with Acanac
Hi All,
I noticed that there is a lot of bad PR for Acanac, but at the same time they get an 80% positive review rating.
I am a new customer of acanac and have no bias either way at this point. As a brand new customer I have the opportunity to provide some unbiased feedback here about my future experience with Acanac.
I hope this will be useful to other forum readers as the time passes. |
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pcbrand
join:2003-03-25
| I should also mention that I am very IT literate and used to work as a network admin in my past, so I am very comfortable setting the whole thing myself. My main concern is for the DSL service to be there and be up, most of the inhouse configuration issues (wiring, IP routing, etc.) I should be able to easily resolve myself.
Yesterday I ordered my Acanac service for a brand new house in a brand new subdivision.
I want to have the VOIP service on a dryloop DSL line. We don't intend to have regular Bell service at the house if we can avoid it.
I called acanac support to see what kind of VOIP service we could expect. I also wanted to know how good of a DSL service I can expect based on my location.
The two times I spoke to support they were very quick to pickup and very corteous and I had the impression they wanted to help.
They explained that I will need to order the dryloop service since there is no active phone line on the residence.
They also ran a check on the availability of service and came up with only 512Kbs, at which point they advised me that I should not get DSL service because I will not be happy with it. They also said that when processing the order, Acanac's policy is to check the DSL availability to see how good of a service the client would get - and based on my numbers they would reject the order, because performance would be pretty terrible.
Since this is a new house, I had a feeling that the database they're polling the availability info from is probably not up to date. So I called Bell and ask their techs to do a line test. They did and came up with a 7Mbs reading from several of the lines they already have installed in there (my immediate neighbours).
So I called acanc sales and explained the situation, and ask them to continue processing the order based on the info Bell have provided. The woman on the phone was also very corteous and said she will put a note on the order to make sure it gets processed. She then explained some standard stuff: That they will ship the order withing 2 bus. days and that the dryloop will within 7-10 days to install by Bell.
She also asked me which area code I would like. Unfortunately I do not get to choose the actual number, but I am willing to live with that.
Based on these commitments - I am now waiting for the confirmation email, and for the package to arrive sometime next week.
It is important to understand that we do not currently have any other phone line to the house and this will be our main line. |
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pcbrand
join:2003-03-25
| Since I haven't recieved any feedback till yesterday (2+ BUSINESS days after order has been placed)I placed a call with acanac.
Again the tech was polite, he looked in my file and appologized that no one got back to me. He said that I had a note on the file that my service level is too low (512Kbs) which is why the order wasn't processed further - but the same tech who made the note was also supposed to send me an email, which he/she did not.
I mentioned my situation (see details in previous post) and the fact that there was supposed to be some kind of comment on my order. He looked at it again and said that indeed there was a note saying that Bell verified a 7Mbs service there... So obviously the tech filling the original order did not read the entire ticket... In any case, he appologized again and promised to get this processed right away.
Indeed a couple of hours later I have received an email with a fedex tracking number indicating that the modem will be delivered to my address today before 5:00pm.
Now I have to wait for the dryloop/DSL line to be installed by Bell. I guess by Acanac's service level commitment it should be done within 5-7 days (keeping in mind that Bell does work on the weekend)...
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pcbrand
join:2003-03-25
| The modem arrived by Fedex on July 4th. Fedex tracking said that it was supposed to be delivered on July 3rd. However, no big deal because the line is not active yet.
The modem came with a quickstart type of instructions on how to get it going once the DSL line is activated.
Also, I got an email from acanac activating my voip plan - it's kind of useless at this point because I don't have the DSL line yet.
However, since I have internet access from my office - I did go to the voip web site and set up the voice mail feature to forward to my gmail mailbox. I did a sample call to the number and left a voicemail and it sent the voicemail to my gmail account within a minute or so.
I also played around with the hunt feature - and it worked as advertised with my cell phone.
So far so good - but I am still waiting for the most important service which is the DSL to become active.
By my count the DSL dryloop should become active sometime this week. My order was confirmed and processed by Acanac on July 2.
I am not sure how this dryloop part is supposed to be done, the phone cable is currently simply hanging on the side of my house and is not connected to anything. I assume a Bell tech will come to connect the phone cable to the Demarcation point on my house. I wish there was a way to track this service call somehow... |
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zadigre
join:2006-10-02
Montreal, QC
 ·Acanac Inc.
| reply to pcbrand
did you tell Acanac that there was no wire connected to your house?
After a few days waiting for the dry loop installation, I sent an email to Acanac support about the outside wire not connected to my house... and they said there was a setup issue with my installation and they asked Bell to send a technician. So this Bell technician finally intalled the outside wire correctly... |
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pcbrand
join:2003-03-25
| Thanks for the feedback Zadigre.
I did mention to acanac that it's a brand new sub division and that the house was never connected to any sort of service... I assumed they knew all along that a Bell tech will have to come out.
I will place another call with Acanac just to make sure they are aware. |
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pcbrand
join:2003-03-25
| Okay - so on Zadigre's advice I called acanac support yesterday (July 8).
This time I had to wait about 10 minutes on hold before I got a tech online, this was afterhours (around 8:00pm) so I guess it is reasonable.
I was told that my DSL line is showing as activated, so Acanac had no idea that I don't even have a demaracation box. When I mentioned that the Bell cables near my house are not connected to anything (ie. just hanging there and there is not Bell box of any kind) they said they'll place a call for a Bell technician to go out to my house and set this up.
Due to the late hour, Acanac's support person said that Bell would come out on Thursday. They could have done this by Wednesday if I have called earlier in the day. |
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pcbrand
join:2003-03-25
| Okay - it looks like the first major hiccup occured with the Acanac's support. After not having the Bell tech show up on Thursday - I called Acanac support again.
The support person spent about 10 minutes trying to find any evidence that I actually called on Tuesday. Apparently my call from Tuesday was not recorded anywhere on the Acanac systems and naturally no request for a Bell tech was created. So he appologized and entered the ticket on the Bell system (while I am on the phone) and said that they will probably do this sometime over the weekend since Bell techs work on weekends.
I am assuming this was a simple mistake (forgot to press 'enter' or something) by the first support person. While an infrequent occurence of these type of errors is acceptable for any tech support organization. However, by my count this is the third time I had to call to fix human error issues with my account. These should have been caught the first time I have entered my order.
Especially since I would assume this is a fairly common type of account activation.
I can only hope that once service is actually connected this will not be the typical experience. |
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bain_eh
@host36-server.com
| reply to pcbrand
all the best to you, i'll be following your posts.
i had my acanac account set up over the may 2-4 w/e this year - dry loop as well, but in an older building.
from online ordering to modem delivery, it was about a week, and everything has been smooth since.
again, hope all works out, keep us posted. |
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pcbrand
join:2003-03-25
| Okay - it seems like the saga continues...
After the weekend has come and gone and no Bell tech in sight I called acanac support again first thing this morning (around 9:00am).
Lo and behold - there was no record of my call from Friday July 11. The last record they had was from my phone call on July 3rd... So acanac is missing at least 3 of the phone calls and the entire "no demarcation box on my house" issue. Needless to say, I am not getting a warm and fuzzy feeling from this situation.
The tech I spoke with in the morning appologized but obvioulsy there was nothing he could do. He entered me into the Bell system (again?) and this time gave me a tracking number. He said that Bell usually sends out a tech within 24 hours after the request has been made.
Just to make sure, building on my ongoing experience, I decided to give support a call again before leaving work, around 4:30. I am glad I did - apparently Bell has responded (yesterday!) that the line is activated and acanac closed the ticket today... and I still don't have a demarcation box on my house.
In any case, the tech I spoke with in the afternoon has reopenned the ticket, put a note there that I still need a demarcation box and he said that Bell now has 24 hours to respond to it, but because it's now late in the day the tech would most likely show up at the house a day after tomorrow (Wednesday) rather than tomorrow.
In other words I am looking at the same situation as in my July 9th entry.
Obviously there are some major mis-communication going on somewhere in the Acanac/Bell interactions. I don't really care who's fault it is at this point - just someone get the demaraction installed already... it's not rocket science. |
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Acanac Inc
Premium
join:2007-03-05
Mississauga, ON
| Please do let me know the current status. If it has not yet been resolved can you please provide me with your contact information. I would like to check the status myself.
Best Regards,
Paul
»www.acanac.ca |
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pcbrand
join:2003-03-25
| Paul - I will send you a PM with my contact info.
As for latest update, I called Acanac last night again (after the Bell tech did not show up on Wednesday either). The Acanac tech looked up the ticket on the Bell system and said that they show a dispatch time for 6:06pm for Thursday July 17. I was advised to call Acanac back today to check the status since the Bell dispatch time usually changes during the day.
I asked the Acanac tech to just be explicit in their note section and actually write something like "customer needs a Bell tech to install a demaractaion box on the house" as opposed to some general statement like "send a tech" that I suspect would end up in the tech going to the junction box on the street instead of to the house.
In any case, the tech told me that the note actually does say to install a new demarcation box, so there should not be any confusion anymore. |
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pcbrand
join:2003-03-25
| Okay - this is hilarious (depends on your viewpoint). I just got a message from a Bell tech (maybe 20 minutes ago) that they had visited the area and everything appears fine and that if I have any issues I should call back to my ISP...
Well guess what, I hate to do an "I told you so" but Bell still did not put a demarcation box on the house. So again -nobody actually physicaly went to the house. I had people in the house all day today and they assured me no one was anywhere near the house. The wires with the orange Bell tag are still hanging loose out there.
Since it is clearly Bell's fault now, I wish I could call them directly and give them a piece of my mind, but like the message said I have to call my ISP if I have any further issues.
I am calling Acanac support right now, the tech is trying to catch someone live in Bell to talk to about this because by any standard this is beyond ridiculous already.
So the guys from Acanac called me back conferenced with a Bell guy on the line. The Bell guy tried to tell me that I need to call 611 in order to get Jacks installed in my house. I patiently explained that the house is fully wired inside, and it's the outside connection to a physical Bell line that is missing. |
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pcbrand
join:2003-03-25
| Had another short chat with the guy from Bell. It seems they don't really have a clear-cut process for handling this stuff. He even suggested that I should wire it myself, because Bell doesn't normally do this kinda of thing (Huh?)
To make a long story short - I eventually convinced the guy that this is really something Bell normally does as part of their Business As Usual... Really. So they scheduled a tech to come over again in the next day or two. |
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bt1999
Premium
join:2008-02-08
Markham, ON
·Acanac Inc.
| reply to pcbrand
Wow ... if you hadn't indicated that you were actually conferenced in to a Bell tech, it could have been interpreted by others that it could be a "he said/she said" situation. Sorry to see you in such a tough and frustrating situation.
I used to be with Bell, but never required their tech support over the years. However, their sales department screwed me ... so I ended up with Acanac.
There are many comments regarding their tech support ... but again, I've never had to deal with support ... and can't comment on that.
However, I've been in contact with Paul a few times and he has been excellent!
Anyhow, I hope this gets resolved for you very soon. |
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pcbrand
join:2003-03-25
| A nice surprise. When I came home last night there was a Bell van in front of my house. That's like a whole day earlier than they indicated... wow.
The Bell tech installed the Demarcation - so I finally got my connection to the outside world.
He then took a reading for the DSL signal and his meter showed that my profile is set to 512/512. He then ran a test on the line and it showed that it could easily do the 5000kbs profile, but he said I would have to call the ISP for that.
I placed a call with Acanc as soon as I came into the house and the support person told me that it's no problem to switch the profile, but they have to get Bell involved again and it will take 4 business days to do it - I.E., next Wednesday - painful wait yet again.
At least I finally have a DSL connection going, although it is a very basic one. I configured my Sipura ATA3102 and was pleasantly surprised that the VOIP quality was pretty good. I wasn't expecting much with such a low profile. But then again, the modem is not really doing anything other than VOIP at the moment.
I'll see how it goes in the next few days - hopefully my next update will be when the profile is upgraded. |
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zadigre
join:2006-10-02
Montreal, QC | reply to pcbrand
most of the time, a profile change takes 24 hours or less... but yes, Bell has 4 business days to respond to any tickets sent by Acanac... |
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pcbrand
join:2003-03-25
| So it looks like Bell took their sweet time until the last minute in their SLA. Last night (Wednesday), around 10pm the modem finally showed a raised profile of 3008/800.
So I am still not in the promised land of the 5Mbs (5056/800) profile. And I know for a fact my line can do the 5 Meg profile since the Bell tech did a line test (see previous post).
I placed a call again with Acanac this morning and asked them to engage Bell again and raise the profile to the correct 5 Meg setting. The tech said it will take upto 48 hours to do it.
Meanwhile, since a 3Mbs bandwidth is still much more usable than the 512Kbs, I finally played around a little with the connection last night.
I downloaded a test torrent to see if I am throttled. I hit a close to 200Kbs speed, which would seem to mean that I am not throttled...  This was around midnight, which is supposed to be Bell throttling time - can anyone confirm this or provide more details about Bell's throttling policy?
I also requested the online PC via email and got all the info alost immediately. However, I cannot connect to it from work at the moment - this could be my corporate firewall that blocking it though.
VOIP worked fairly well upto this point. However, there were a few times where service dropped because of failed registration. This was on the provider side since my DSL connection was up and running very consistently. Also, I had to redial several times on an international call I made (kept getting "all circuits are busy"). But at the end of the day I am pretty content with the VOIP service so far.
I am thinking to setup QOS at some point in order to allow VOIP to live happily with all the other traffic on the line. At this time the line is very lightly used so there were no restrictions on VOIP bandwidth.
Again, I am hoping to update this thread again when I finally get upgraded to a 5Meg profile. I will also put in some of my personal observations/tips on the process of getting the initial Acanac service.
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pcbrand
join:2003-03-25
| Just quick update. Came home this evening and the profile has been set at 5Megs.
The stats are not stellar, seems to indicate I am at roughly 4.5km from the CO. I wish they could have put me on the remote CO that is much closer. The Bell tech informed me that there is a remote CO in my neighbourhood - this is how Bell seels their 7Meg service around here. The hint was that if I was a Sympatico customer I would have definitely been placed on the remote in order to get maximum possible bandwidth for my location.
I have no clue how Acanac and Bell work this out between them, but it definitely seems like as a 3rd party ISP clients, we are getting the worst of that deal.
Connection Status Connected
Us Rate (Kbps) 800
Ds Rate (Kbps) 5056
US Margin 10
DS Margin 10
Trained Modulation ADSL_G.dmt
LOS Errors 0
DS Line Attenuation 51
US Line Attenuation 31
Peak Cell Rate 1886 cells per sec
CRC Rx Fast 73
CRC Tx Fast 3
CRC Rx Interleaved 0
CRC Tx Interleaved 0
Path Mode Fast Path
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pcbrand
join:2003-03-25
| Okay - time for another update.
Had the (full) service for about 3 weeks now.
While DSL is satisfactory - VOIP is a whole different story.
DSL service is not too shabby at all. Getting pretty nice speeds on downloads (torrents, http/ftp, etc.)
Overall it is very stable as well, I can't recall it being down at all during this time.
The DSL modem Acanac sent me seems to be a bit buggy. I tried to turn on some of the more advanced functions there and the web interface simply doesn't open the links, or gives a "page not found" error. Also, for some reason accessing the modem via web interface is *extremely* slow. Regardless of all of that, it seems to do its main function (connecting to the DSL) very well and it should be good enough for most users.
As far as VOIP is concerned, it is quite dissapointing so far! It seemed a hit-or-miss game every time I pick up the phone. Sometimes you get a line and sometimes not. I would estimate that there was at least 1 evening every week so far that the VOIP service could not register with the Acanac server. When the service is down - it stays down for the entire evening (we're talking prime calling time here) - it only comes back sometime in the middle of the night.
What's even more frustrating is that there is no acknowledgement whatever from Acanac that the service is down - the only way to know is if you call support or go to the user forums on the Acanac site and see if anyone else complained.
When I called support during one of the outages (around 10:30pm) I had to wait for a long time (20+ minutes), and the tech was himself unaware that voip doesn't work. However, he was able to verify that the server was indeed down and that it was not a local problem with my setup.
In any case, by my estimates the VOIP server has been down during the evenings approximately 10-15% of the time. This was always due to a problem at the server side. I do not know what Acanac is planning in terms of infrastructure upgrades - but the service is clearly not ready for prime time yet - So if you are considering it as your main phone service, just be aware of that.
With all of that said - when the VOIP is up it works very well. The calls are clear and virtually of the same quality as a normal POTS Bell line. If Acanac could solve their server side issues, this would indeed be a very nice alternative to regular phone service. But right now, one should really have an alternative phone backup (cell phone, or another line) because the service cannot be relied upon to be up.
In any case, I'll keep updating this in the next weeks and months - hopefully Acanac can get the VOIP issues resolved. |
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