I don't even understand why a company would want to buy out BCE as was finally approved last week. I myself have had a number of problems with them on a service level, with unannounced changes of e-mail servers, and unexplained loss of connection for days at a time (though that hasn't happened in a while now). That's not even getting into the fact that Bell has deemed it appropriate to throttle internet connections, whether legitimate or otherwise, all while actually increasing the cost of the high speed service since the time we initially signed on.
In what other market do you see a diminished quality of service for an increase in price? I sure can't think of any.
Then late last week out of the blue, Carolyn's family Sympatico connection went down for no good reason. With no apparent changes being made to the modem-router combo (that you are forced to rent from Bell as opposed to buying your own and saving money in the long run), all three of their computers were unable to connect. After hours on the phone with their tech 'support' spread out over much of the weekend, her dad was driven to screaming at the useless tits at the other end of the phone line.
It seems to be Sympatico policy to always pass the blame to the customer. In this case they had Carolyn disable her wireless card, and in whatever else they had her do, remove the drivers for said card, causing more headaches later. Along with that, they tried to insist that Internet Explorer HAD to be used, and that there was some error, apparently present instantaneously on all of their computers at once that was causing the problem. This despite the fact that 2 of those 3 computers were reformatted and configured recently and were clean of any kind of spyware, adware or viruses. I've managed to reconfigure everything for them now and it seems to be up and running fine again, but that's not to say that Sympatico should be let off the hook for their useless 'help'.
After the first 2 hours on the phone, they should have been willing to send a technician out to the house, maybe not same day or anything, but nonetheless within a day or two. Instead, they shipped out a new modem, without the wireless capability of the previous one, and strung them all along for a ride blaming the customer's computer instead of their own shortcomings, something I've run into with my own dealings with them.
Then to top all this off, I read this morning that Bell is restructuring their cell phone billing to charge their clients for incoming text messages. While thankfully not a Bell mobile customer, you can guarantee I wouldn't be one for a second longer once they started pulling that kind of bullshit, effectively making double the profit on messages exchanged between Bell customers. Of course it makes sense to charge fees for outgoing messages, but incoming messages? The client can do nothing to control what messages they receive. On an incoming call you at least have the option not to answer the call, but a text message doesn't have the same feature. But its these kind of backhanded business practices I guess that make a company worth billions. Watch out, in the months ahead I foresee Bell adding a rental surcharge for the copper communications lines running into your home that have been there for decades.
Labels: Bell, internet, technology
