In my last post, High Speed Cometh to Those Who Wait, I mentioned that Bell had called my up to say that upgrades in my area meant that DSL was now available. I think I said something like "... won't truly believe it until the bits are flowing down the pipe." Well, it looks like all that got upgraded was Bell's optimism about the range of their budget DSL offering.
What follows is a letter I wrote to Bell, CC'ing the North Renfrew Times.
On February 23rd I received a voice mail that sounded too good to be true. Chad from Bell had called to say that upgrades in my area of Laurentian Hills meant that high speed internet was now available. My wife and I both work out of our house for software companies in Toronto. Our internet connection is our tether to our jobs. It would give us great joy to dispense with the restrictions, unreliability, and high cost that is the reality of our existing two-way satellite connection.
I returned the call and asked to be hooked up as soon as possible. Chad arranged for a Bell sales agent to call me on the Monday morning. When the call came I was informed that I could only get the "Essential" package, which is slower than our satellite link. Despite that, we still deemed it worth switching.
Two day later, when I checked the Bell web site, it had changed to say that we were now eligible for the faster "Total Internet Performance" package. So, I called back to confirm this and a Bell representative said I could have any package I wanted. When I asked if I needed a different modem for the faster package, I was told yes, and that I needed to send back the first one they had sent me. So I returned the first one to sender. It took me weeks of phone calls to get a replacement sent out. When the replacement finally arrived a few days ago, on my birthday, it was the same kind I had sent back in the first place. I found out later that they had never actually upgraded my account to the "Total Internet Performance" package.
When I finally plugged in my modem, the connection light remained blank. This did not surprise me because, by this point, I had learned that several of my neighbours had already experienced this. However, I gamely phoned up 310-Bell to see if anyone could do anything for me. After about an hour I managed to work my way up to the top level tech support who scheduled a service appointment for the next day. Ten minutes later she called back and said that, she was sorry, but due to "distance issues", high speed was not available in our area. When I asked to have the service removed from my account, the agent from technical support said that I had to call the business center again.
I spent another two hours of my birthday getting bounced back-and-forth between the business agents and the tech support agents in search of a promise that the service would be cancelled. The business agents refused to believe me when I told them that I could not receive high speed at my location, and they kept bouncing me back to the tech support side, except for one woman who clearly did not want to deal with the issue and just unceremoniously disconnected me.
The worst part is that I know that this drama is likely replaying itself all over the area with my neighbours. After canvasing the whole area looking for "takers", only to waste countless hours of our time, perhaps Bell could actually perform the upgrades that they promised to all of us. At this point, I do not have much faith that I will see that happen.
