 Review by ssherwood 
UPDATED: 1.6 years ago
member for 7.7 years, 769 visits, last login: 1 days ago
 Toronto,ON
 $44 per month
 about 5 days
 Bell Canada
 "Great speed for WWW and e-mail though not much else."
 "Horrid traffic shaping ISP."
 "RUN as fast as you can away from this ISP."
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(ratings below consensus)
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Update --> April 1, 2008
Don't walk ... RUN as fast as you can away from this horrible company.
Bell has unfortunately turned to anti-competitive measures to attempt to stem the flow of customers away from its competitors.
Their services once were highly reliable, but now unfortunately on on par with Rogers and other monopolist companies who try to squeeze every ounce of possible profit from their subscriber base without re-investing in their core product to match pace with growing demands.
If DSL is your only option, try a third party ISP such as Teksavvy who at the very least are fighting for their customers by trying to have Bell's unfair and anti-competitive measures put out to pasture.
-- SS
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Hello,
I've enjoyed Bell's DSL offerings now for several years (3 years in Montreal and about 2.5 years in Toronto), with a brief stop-over to Roger's high speed offering about 3 years ago when I moved from Montreal to Toronto.
In Montreal, on their "HSE Internet" or, 1-Meg ADSL I enjoyed very consistent and reliable speeds, 90% of the time testing at about 850kbit (105kb/s) download speed and 105kbit (13kb/s) upload speeds. This was quite acceptable based on the advertised 960/120kbit speeds. During my years of service in Montreal, I can count the outages that I had for longer than a couple of hours on 1 hand. Excellent and reliable service considering this is a residential offering.
Some years later, I moved to Toronto and decided to finally try out the "other", supposedly superior offering of Roger's. Needless to say, after being spoiled in Montreal with my reliable Bell/Sympatico DSL, the continual "peaks and valleys" that I experienced with Roger's was unbearable. I lasted only 6 months before switching back to Sympatico.
I wasn't sure what to expect at the time, but sure enough, Sympatico's DSL was once again solid and reliable. I decided to try a 3rd party's DSL (IAM-Net) when I moved to another apartment, as they offered the service for $10 cheaper than Bell for those who owned their own DSL modems, as I do. The service wasn't quite as good in terms of reliability ... likely due to over subscribing the service. (several tests of overtaxed routers proved this point down the road.) Unwilling/able to fix the problem for what seemed like a long term solution, I once again migrated back to Bell/Sympatico's DSL (Ultra this time) and returned to a reliable and stable connection.
In our 3rd and final location in Toronto, we went directly to Bell and have enjoyed consistent and stable speeds. (this includes downgrading to "Regular" DSL from "Ultra" when they upgraded all of the users to 3000/800kbit) My speedtests are rather consistent. 2600/690kbit -- not blazing speed, but typical of this connection class in good situations.
Do you detect a theme in this review? I think the most important aspect of Internet service is the reliability factor. When I use it, I want it to work, at the usual speed. I don't want to have to factor in what time of day it is etc.. With recent reports that only about 10% of installed fiber is actually "lit" or in use, I find bandwidth problems being the least of ISP's problems ... especially as bandwidth providers to the ISPs have never been charging less for our ISPs capacity. In this regard, Bell/Sympatico excels. True, their NNTP service is non-existent and there have been occasional problems with their Radius servers. (Radius servers are the ones that provide the user login interface for the PPPoE sessions that DSL uses) But I rarely lose line sync, and when I do it is largely during a scheduled maintenance period.
If blazing speed potential is your bag, Bell Sympatico may not be for you. If good to excellent speed is acceptable, I think you'll find a good fit with DSL.
I hope that this review is helpful to those looking to Bell Canada's DSL offerings. For the record, I lived in the Downtown area of Montreal (Sherbrooke and Parc -- then Parc and Mount Royal) and then in three different areas in Toronto. (Danforth and Pape (bad Rogers there) -- then Bathurst & St. Clair, and finally Greenwood & Gerrard)
As a side note, I am currently switching back to Roger's (Extreme High Speed) as I am going to try their digital cable and we already have their wireless products, so the bundle is very appealing. I will be very interested to see if the reliability of their service can compare to what I have experienced with Bell over the past years.... if I'm back to DSL in 6 months, you'll know why!
-- SS
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