[Rant]Whould you like your password with that?

[Dan]

One of the bigest disavatanges about being at my parents house over the summer is the inertnet connection, unfronty they went with bell spamtapico (tho considering there only other choice was rogers probly not that bad) witch is ADSL based internet connection that claims to go as fast as 5MBPS.

One of the first things i noticed when i got here was my downloads went from 100s of kbps to just 100s of bps, this is due to there throting for the "befinit" of the network. Lucky i was able to tirck it with some creative port forwording, ecription and playing with the settings but then the next issue hit. The internet would go away when some one made a phone call or we got a phone call, this was rather odd since we where not using dail up but DSL (still uses phone lines tho) and we had microfiliters on all the phones. This was not overly suprising tho as the internet used to go out when it rained due to water geting in to the crapy phone lines witch have shorts in them and where exposed to the weather (bell "fixed" this by using duck taped on the phone box outside).

I could live with the net droping every time there was a phone call, but it slowly got worse and worse and the drops happend with out phone calls more and more ferquently intill i tryed to check my e-mail tonight and there was nothing, no internet at all. I tryed restarting every router and modem i could find to no pervale. So i thougth to my self that this might be just a tempary problem and i could deal with it tomroe being 1am and all. Intill then i could use the dail up connection bell so genrealy gives there DSL users 20 hours of a month, but this is where things started going down hill even more.

First of all i could not find the dail up number, i had the one for my parents old house in st. chaternce and the one for the faimly cotage by lake eraie but not the one for the waterloo area or what ever this just out side of waterloo area is called (arpently the phone compny it's self can not mange seting up a singal toll free number for there dail up internet). So with my noraml resources offline, i decied to pick up the phone book and look up the symptico dail up number. Affter some time of looking all i could find was the custmer servrice number with a note beside it saying that custmer service repsentives where only aviable during business hours (i guse the phone company pefures to keep there dail up number unlisted to stop thos pesky prank callers). I decied to call thinking that there would be an automated system that i could press some buttions and it would tell me the dail up number in a nice automaed voice, but no such luck.

Affter hiting 1 for english it asked for my phone number, but i had no idea as silly as that sounds. Noramly i store numbers in my cell phone under a name and never look at them aganin (also my learning disblity does not help matters with remebring unrealted serie of numbers) so i just typed in the area code (519) and waited. After a few seconds the ghost in the mashice side somthing along the lines of "ERROR, could not vailidate caller identity, try again". So i started frankly looking up my own (or my parents) nummber in the phone book befor hal hung up on me. But as i was geting to the S section i hured a voice on the phone with a very thick acent thanking me for choicing bell (aprently they ment business hours in india). The chat that fallowed went somthign like this:

Bell Guy: "What number are you calling from today?"
Dan: "ugh....i don't know?...."
*ocword pause*
Bell Guy (Confused): "You don't know?.........Do you know your acount number?"
Dan: "No..."
Bell Guy: "Username?"
Dan: "ugh....no"
*ocword pause*
Bell Guy: "Your name sir?"
*dan gives name*
Bell Guy: "What can i help you with today, Daniel?"
Dan: "I would like to know the dail up number for the waterloo/519 area."
*bell guy typing*
Bell Guy: "....Scarborough?"
Dan: "....well if thats in the area..." *cut off by next line*
Bell Guy: "What is your phone number? We can't do this with out your phone number!"
Dan: "...ugh....well...i..." *cut off again*
Bell Guy: "Are you calling from home? Are you going to connect there?"
Dan: "Ya, my DSL is not working so...." *cut off yet again*
Bell Guy: "It says you have high speed so you don't need to dail up."
[b[Dan:[/b] "I know but..." *sigh*
Bell Guy: "So the number for Scarborough is...." *goes on to give the dail up number*
Dan: "Thank..." *god dam it let me finsih a sectence*
Bell Guy: "Is there anything eltes i can help you with today? Do you need the password and username?"
*dan puases in shock*
Dan: "What???"
Bell Guy: "Do you need the password?"
Dan: "No!"
Bell Guy: "Username?"
Dan: "No....I..I have it."
Bell Guy: "Are you sure you don't need the password?"
Dan: "Yes."
Bell Guy: "Is there anything eltes i can help you with today?"
Dan: "No....Bye.."
*dan hangs up*

Now admitly he did get me the dail up number in the right area code eventualy (part of the problem could have been the bad conenction due to the phone lines acting up, come to think of it, it was raining at the time) but he frecking offred to give the username and password to some one who does not even know the phone number they are on, the username, acount number, and gives a name that is not on the bill or account at all??? Does this mean i can call from any home phone with sympatico and get there username, password and where to dail up? The bigger WTF might be that bell seemingly stores your password in plain text and has them aviable to any call center empoyle that can type. Also why does bell have the ablity to hire 24/7 tech support but not set up a toll free dail up number or be able to print the dail up numbers in the phone book or even have them on an automated phone system?

--Dan
--Surfing on dail up, hoping the rain goses away so he can use DSL again....

Edit: It seems that dail up is both more 100s of times more stable and gets just as good download speeds for torrents as the high speed DSL...witch is just sad.

[rizzix]

LOL. Hey at least they make life a little more interesting

Btw, I too have had HORRIBLE episodes with Bell Sympatico's customer services. They're just pathetic.

[Mackie]

Rogers tech support people are very nice. Still not helpful of course... But nice.

[Insectoid]

lol, we got sympatico as well. The 'ultra-high speed'(10mbps) takes about 2 minutes to load this page, as well as being completely random weather or not it works at all. The speed seems random too, It's going fine for an hour, then it crashes and starts getting errors and goes at about 500 b/s (so slow, I could take a crap and come back before it loads the page...) The tech support is horrible, how do those people get hired? and why are they all asian? I assume they read their remedies from a book. Why can't they save us all some trouble and give us the book with the connection? The wireless router they gave us burnt out in a week. Rated for 4 wired computers and who knows how many wireless, and we had 1 computer hooked up (and sometimes a laptop). I'd also like to rant about mdg's computers, but that would be much to off topic (D*mn 'fancy' power buttons...)

EDIT- The e-mail system is terrible, they give you like, 6 minutes to type an e-mail. If it takes longer, they won't send it, and you lose everything you type (My mom has to copy every e-mail in case this happens...)

[jernst]

Mackie @ Sat May 31, 2008 7:17 am wrote:

Rogers tech support people are very nice. Still not helpful of course... But nice.

I disagree. When I signed up for their extreme edition internet when it came out a couple years ago they messed up and left my speed down at lite. I had tons of proof that it was running way to slow and I emailed them about it, however since it was my dads account and the email was from me, the told me to take a hike. Then I called them and the same thing happened. They refused to even listen to me until I explained to them that I was paying for the upgrade from lite to extreme. Then they kept denying they messed up with the speed until I insisted on talking to someone who knew what they were talking about. The guy who I finally got agreed something was wrong on their end and had to be fixed. Then I had to argue about getting my money back for the last couple of months on top of it all! ARG! It seems around here it doesnt matter who you have for ISP

[Clayton]

Dan wrote:

One of the first things i noticed when i got here was my downloads went from 100s of kbps to just 100s of bps, this is due to there throting for the "befinit" of the network.

What? I'm on bell, and if anything, my speeds have only been going up. They rarely drop below 700KB/s...

[wtd]

Clayton @ Sun Jun 01, 2008 12:55 am wrote:

Dan wrote:

One of the first things i noticed when i got here was my downloads went from 100s of kbps to just 100s of bps, this is due to there throting for the "befinit" of the network.

What? I'm on bell, and if anything, my speeds have only been going up. They rarely drop below 700KB/s...

Well, now you know where all the bandwidth is going, Dan.

[Vermette]

DSL service is still dependent on the distance between you and your Central Office (CO). I believe the cutoff for *decent* speeds on a non-dry loop connection is roughly 7km of cable.

You can use this page to locate the CO for your exchange and therefore get the MINIMUM distance between you and the CO. Since the cables run along streets and not in a direct line to your address this can only give a rough estimate. If your neighbour across the street is measured as 3km from the CO, that doesn't mean you are too . Consider that perhaps the cable only crosses the street to your side at the intersection 1km away; that means you could be 5km down the line instead of 3!

I was planning to switch to TekSavvy a couple of months ago, but I'm too far from my CO to get anything better than 1Mbit... not worth the price.

[Dan]

This has nothing to do with distance, it clearly is throuthing as when we first had bell befor i went to university we got the 700KB/s type speeds as well.

As for teksavvy that makes no sence as they are just a bell reseller and use the same lines, routers, and CO as bell. They even have the perielge of geting thrroteled like bell custmers.


I have a bit of an update to the sotry:

When i got up today my connection was still totaly off line, so i went to use dail up only to notice that it also was not working. I could connect and login but no itnernet at all.

I called up tech supoort and affter 1.6 hours of talking and going threw every singal debuing method with 5 diffrent tech support guys in india they final decied that it could be there problem and called the "Senior support group" who told them there is a "local system outage" in my area and that it would be fixed in 3 to 5 hours. over an hour and a half for them to check if the system was ok or not??? I told them when i called that it was not an issue on my end and i had to do redicules debuing methods.

At once point the guy wanted me to unisall my firewire network driers some how thinking that my eithernet went threw firewire and that it would slove the problem even tho the probelm was on all computers in the house.

I can understand going threw the debuging steps as some peoleop calling might have limited knowalge of the topic and need help such as turn your modem on and off. But making me do it over and over and over again is just messed up and insualting when i clearly gave information tell them where the problem would have to be. And there debuging steps seem to go backwords, first they start to see if you can connect and ping the modem and when you can but still no intiner net they go back to thinking the porblem is with your computer not conneting to the modem and you drivers are not installed right.

Acording to my parents this is not the first time there have been wide spread internt outages int he town and they rember serveral 24 hour periods of no one being able to connect at all and bell not caring much and times when there modem broke and it took bell 5 weeks to send a new one.

It is now over 6 hours since the call and the inernet was sposted to have been fixed by now but the best i get is a dail up connection witch some times works for a few mins and loses the connection every few seconds. (I am spefical if this post will go threw). I even tryed chaning the DNS setings to openDNS (yes i am a geek i keep the openDNS ips with me) and no luck.

It is a shame that we in canada have let our ISPs get such a monpoly that there is no altertiveite. I am not the bigest fan of the cpaslitstic system but is the idea not that if a company does a crapy job the market will punish them and consumers can go to the better company?? How and why do we let such monpolys take place? Rogers charges me $100 for 2MB of data on my phone, bell barely has a connection and there techsupport is as good as the automate voice system and rogeres intenrert is raping net netueral all over the place well spint in our faces!

If we as canadina citizens let this monpaoly keep going we will quiclky be paying the most for our winreless and interner services and geting the worst qauilt and poorest connections around. I would say switch to better ISPs now! but who? companys like teksavvy although maybe good intnetioned are still bell reslesers and are forced to be just as bad and bell still gets moeny, rogers is trying to beat comcast in the US at who can desotry netnetuality the quickest and most of us are forced to either pick from 1 DSL or one cable provied.

If some one out there knows of a way to get inertnet from an indpenet ISP for the love of god let me know becues this madness needs to end now!

[Insectoid]

I suppose we could stop using the internet (but being computer nerds, I suppose the internet is vital to our health...). I don't think there is anything we can do, we need the internet, and they are the only ones who supply it. Unless you write a program to steal the net from the lines (Could it be done?!) and thus have the crappy stuff for free, we have no choice but to support the monopoly.

[Bobrobyn]

insectoid @ Sat May 31, 2008 10:16 pm wrote:

I suppose we could stop using the internet (but being computer nerds, I suppose the internet is vital to our health...). I don't think there is anything we can do, we need the internet, and they are the only ones who supply it. Unless you write a program to steal the net from the lines (Could it be done?!) and thus have the crappy stuff for free, we have no choice but to support the monopoly.

It's....*cough*...possible...from Rogers...

Dan: Yeah. It's been bothering me for a while. What we really need is someone with a lot of money coming in and becoming the coolest ISP on the planet...or at least, in Canada...or something. I can't really think of anything we can do to stop it.

[Dan]

Well i think voting for a goverment that cares might help :p

It would be intresting to get feed back from the main poltical partys in canada to see where they stand.

[StealthArcher]

It's about like that here, though I seem to be able to 'coerce' my internet to restart.

Yellowknife on the other hand, had about the BEST internet ever, no cutoffs with two phone calls at the same time, weather (-82 desgrees once) didnt affect it, and we got around 300kbps(edit: downloads, oops) on a 1mbps connection. Northwestel is awesome. It was a monopoly too oddly enough, It's about the only monopoly I can honestly say I was impressed with.

[octopi]

ADSL Providers aren't really just Bell resellers.

Bell only provides the phone lines to the CO, and the highspeed lines to get to your companies systems.

Your linecard is installed by Bell, but its a linecard owned by your ISP. You connect through your ISP's network.

It would be insane to expect each and every company to run their own lines, this is exactly why government regulation has forced these networks open.

There is alot of competition in the ADSL market, with some companies charging less than half of what Sympatico charges. My internet comes to $31.45/month after taxes, but I've seen some companies under $20/month (including taxes, for 5mb service)

[md]

octopi @ 2008-06-01, 12:35 pm wrote:

ADSL Providers aren't really just Bell resellers.

Bell only provides the phone lines to the CO, and the highspeed lines to get to your companies systems.

Your linecard is installed by Bell, but its a linecard owned by your ISP. You connect through your ISP's network.

It would be insane to expect each and every company to run their own lines, this is exactly why government regulation has forced these networks open.

There is alot of competition in the ADSL market, with some companies charging less than half of what Sympatico charges. My internet comes to $31.45/month after taxes, but I've seen some companies under $20/month (including taxes, for 5mb service)

Many companies actually lease the hardware and backbone traffic from bell - they really are just resellers. Even the large ones tend to rent some bell equipment and backbone space; as it isn't economical to run their own hardware in places with small populations.

In an ideal world however there would be a municipality owned "ISP" that provides connectivity from homes to a central switching point. Real services providers would rent rack-space and each have their own hardware in the switching station - or contract it out. Large players might have their own backbones between municipalities - smaller ones would lease space. In either case there would be more then two cross-country backbones; and backbone operators would be heavily regulated and prevented from being owned/owning customer facing ISPs. Separating the different areas of service would help keep markets competitive, much to the benefit of consumers (and detriment of Bell and Rogers).

Alas, such things are a complete pipe-dream. One which I would imagine is not shared among the majority of consumers... who tend to be idiots.