blogONEYesterday afternoon my Bell DSL connection died. At first I thought it would be the routine network death, in which I’d simply have to wait 5 to 10 minutes for everything to get back in order. A whole afternoon later, the connection was still dead.
When I returned in the evening to happily install my new router, in hopes of alleviating my network woes — it wasn’t the router. All along I had thought maybe it was the router which was dying whenever my dad turned his computer on/off, without even having the cute little “LAN Connection Disconnected!” pop-up bubble show up…but no, it was the modem.
Instead of calling Bell at 310-SURF (remember to put 416 first!), I decided to steal a wireless signal and go on Bell Support Chat to request a new modem. I won’t paste the support log here (yet), but the person (or super-computer!?), Pravin, was very helpful. I think at first Pravin thought I simply didn’t connect things correctly, but eventually, as Pravin stated, “the situation was escalated”. Pravin did a line test and determined that I had “major disturbances in the phone line”, which was then supposedly reported to the senior engineers/technicians. I wonder if these disturbances were around for a while… because my speeds are nowhere near advertised (not even half).
48 hours. Correction, around “48 business hours” is how long it would take the techs to fix my problem, Pravin told me, with an assurance that my problems will definitely be solved within that time. Around 6pm, my dad turned on his computer and was excited to see that our Internet connection was restored — I was skeptical at first, until I was actually able to surf. And you know what almost any geek would do? You guessed it! Speed tests.
When we first discovered our service had returned, these were my results:
(~180KB/s)
And later in the evening, this came up:
(~232KB/s)
In both cases my download speed is around 59% slower than the average speed recorded for Bell Sympatico (3411kbps or ~487KB/s). In the more recent test (the evening one), my upload speed is HIGHER than the average Sympatico connection. These results don’t exactly make me incredibly pleased, especially when I am supposedly paying around $50 for a service that states I should be getting “speeds of up to 7Mbps download, 1Mbps upload”. Yes, I shouldn’t expect my service to reach the maximum speed, but maybe it should reach at least half!
It really gets me thinking if Bell’s DSL service/status will ever change to “This service is available”, as opposed to:
Sympatico High Speed members in Toronto may be experiencing service interruptions. We are working to restore service and apologize for any inconvenience. Thank you for your patience.
What an interesting 5 years this has been with Bell…
But in other news, I finally have a wireless connection set up at my place…so i don’t have to steal my neighbour’s wireless. Unless my connection dies. Again. Continuously. 