I got the call from Bell last weekend. They said "High Speed is now available in your neighbourhood." I couldn't believe it, and probably won't truly believe it until the bits are flowing down the pipe.

I should preface this by saying that I live in the middle of nowhere. Deep River, a metropolis of 4200, is the nearest town. It is about six kilometers away from me, far outside DSL range normally. I actually reside in the township of Laurentian Hills in a tiny place called Point Alexander.

We've been trying to get a wireless internet provider to come to the area for some time. I had written off DSL as unattainable.

Needless to say, I asked for a sales person to call me at the earliest possible moment. I said, I'll buy the fastest connection you offer. Here's the kicker, that turned out to be 512kbps with a 2Gb/month download cap. Not exactly a connection plan that gets a power user all rev'ed up. Still, it's better than my current 1.5Mbps connection from Xplornet in many ways. And, it's about $100/month cheaper than my satellite even if I totally blow the bandwidth cap.

However, the story continues...I went to the Bell web site today on a whim and plugged in my phone number. It said that I was eligible to upgrade to 7Mbps! So I called a Bell human being and said "Is this right? Can I really have the full speed deal?" and the woman assured me that I could, so I ordered it.

Now comes the strange part. I started plugging in my neighbour's phone numbers in the Bell site and it says that they are only eligible for 512kbps. The site stubbornly still says I'm good for 7Mbps though.

So, we will see how it goes. Hopefully Bell can honor this promise!!