Magda and I signed up for Bell high speed in May. When I was signing us up I asked if there was a modem rental fee to which the very nice guy I was speaking to said “Nope, no modem rental.” We get our first bill and what do we find.. a $10 modem rental fee. Bell LIED to us. Oh and the charged us $10 to send the modem as well.. which I would have picked up myself if I knew it was going to cost me… Jerks.
The service has been pretty fast, but now web requests go bad. It’s getting very frustrating as web pages don’t load. It’s not the target sites either, waiting a second or two and retrying works about 90% of the time. But, We’re getting this issue more and more. It’s very frustrating to get the dial-up connection window when I try to go to www.google.com.
In addition, we got our first bill for phone service. Bell wants to charge $2.95 for a “Network Charge”??!?!?! WTF!! And get this, they charge $7.00/month for voice mail :O Yeah, we’re cancelling that for sure. Add $0.20 for 911 service, and $2.80 for “touch tone service”. What?!? Like I could even get a rotary phone these days…. All these little extra fees add up and really piss us off. Every where you look there’s a Bell adverts claiming “no hidden fees!”. Yeah right.
UPDATE!
Well we called Bell today and got most of this cleared up. The funniest part was the touch-tone service. Magda asked why we had to pay for this, and the guy replied “well, you still have to pay extra for the new technology”. Touch tone service is NEW technology?!?!.. So what’s VoIP? If this is really Bell’s thinking, they are doomed. I think it’s great Magda suggested that Bell charge rotary phone users extra instead, as it’s always more expensive to support old technology.
I have been battling bell on a number of issues and one is the billing and the garbage technical support and the crap attitude of PASS THE BUCK and also “thats not my department. It was a sad day for me when I left COGECO and signed up with GREEDY BIG CORORATION BELL I can’t wait to be rid of this crap company and to get back to a good company like Cogeco. Consumer Beware.
OH, I remember TPSA…they’re jerks too. I read an article in the Economist when I was in Poland about the future of telecom in the new EU entrants. Good read. Basically said that while in the short term the TPSA monopoly is bad for customers, it will force competitors to build their own separate network, and really pressure TPSA in the long run. The alternative would be TPSA leasing their network to competitors at a reduced cost. That’s what’s happened in Canada, as Bell is legislated to sell their network access to competitors at a lower cost. But, the network technicians here have been on strike for over a year, which means the competitors can’t sign up new customers.. clever bastards eh?
Hey, that really sucks. Polish TPSA (basically a monopolistic hated-by-all juggernaut) claims to be the most technologically advanced company in Poland. Fortunately, there are no hidden fees, but, apart from the landline, most other services are charged: CLIP, detailed monthly call register, time limits, forbidden calls (hi-toll numbers), etc. Interestingly, voice mail is free.
yeah. tell me about it. bell sucks. their slogan should be WTF.