Any Canadians With Bell High Speed..xDSL????

[Tulkas]

I was just wondering because i will be able to get in a month from now. At the great low price of $39.99.. What is the speed like? I will be using it mostly for gaming purposes so... Cant get cable where i am DSL is my only high speed option. Could yu leave yur location as well thanks! Im in the Hamilton Ontario area.

 

[Napalm]

Bell's HSE service is great - download speeds are consistently around 1 Meg and upload is about a quarter of that. Pings are also very good for gaming - I have seen pings as low as about 25ms in games - but average around 50ms or more. Have recommended it to several friends and all are very happy.

Service from Bell is a joke though - they still have the big phone company monopoly mentality. However, I have heard that Rogers Wave is even worse in that department...

Napalm

PS I am in downtown T.O.

 

[Scope]

Just remember to find out how far you are from the central office cause if you are too far then service will suck.
Scope!

 

[Tulkas]

Scope that is exactly what im worried about. I live out in farm area just ourside the city of hamilton.. so distance may be a problem. Hopefully it wont but a guess i will have to see when i get it... if it sucks i guess i will cancel and just use good old dial-up.

 

[Dean]

I'm on Mpower High Speed here in Nova Scotia...Its a subsidiary of bell high speed i believe as it's run on Mt&T through Sympatico

Its a guaranteed 3 megabit connection here

i can usually see 300-400K per second download and 110-140k per second upload

 

[Eug]

Downtown Toronto. A few months ago, service would just drop out and I would get nothing for several hours at a time. I (nicely) suggested that they refund a small amount or extend the service for that amount of time (about a day total) but I just got a curt email back from them (several weeks later) saying that nothing is guaranteed. Plus I'd get frequent dropped connections. Plus they never gave that free month to my friend who I said referred me. False advertising.

However, it's been great in the last couple of months. In Unreal Tournament I can get ping times as low as 35 ms off of servers in the US. (It's usually around 80 or so.) Despite the fact that I'm really just a mediocre player, I can often get in the top three of a deathmatch and win a game now and then. I find that once I'm over 125 or so, UT gaming suffers.

I find the biggest benefit, though, is that the computer is ALWAYS on the internet, and it doesn't block phone calls.

My guess is that no matter slow DSL is, it's still gonna be better than dialup. The main problem with Sympatico is that their software is crapola. The older version of Access Manager had a memory leak, and I couldn't run Windows 98 until I manually deactivated parts of it. (Dunno if it's now fixed - never bothered updating it.) And, I've uninstalled all the other useless Sympatico software. In Windows 2000 I am quite happily free of any Sympatico software - don't even use Access Manager.

 

[Eug]

By the way, I agree that Sympatico customer service isn't the greatest, but the Bell service was quite good. When my line went down, it was fixed within 48 hours, with a repairman who showed up after hours at my request. The line from the main box was actually dead - wonder if a rat chewed thru it or something. They had to give me a new line.

The funny thing is that I didn't mind not having a phone. Not having internet access was torture, however.

 

[SSP]

A friend of mine has Simpatico HSE. Its sucks for him. The Downloads are around 50-60k, upload 25K.

You should definitely find out how far you are from the central office.

BTW - Rogers does have better customer support.

 

[eelw]

Eug: How did you get internet access without using the Access Manager in WIN2K?

SSP: How can you say that Rogers has better customer support than Bell? The longest I have ever waited on hold for a Bell support agent is about 5 minutes. Support was friendly and help solved any problems. Can't say the same thing for Rogers support. Friends that I know of using Rogers, typically are waiting between 15 to 30 minutes on hold, and don't usually have their problems resolved by customer support.

By the way, I live in the Scarborough east area, never lose service and downloading typically around 70kBps.

 

[Eug]

Winpoet.

http://www.sympaticousers.org/faq/winpoet.htm

Works with Win98 as well, but after cleaning up the problems in Win98 I had with Access Manager, I haven't had a need to install Winpoet.

 

[ButanGas]

Bell HSE itself is good, whem you live close to the server (the speed greatly depends on the distance from your house and their server)

Anyways, as a few people already mentioned, their service just sucks sh*t. Stupid phone tech supporters + same email reply everytime. (I wonder if they even use a person to reply mail. I had a problem connecting and e mailed them around 6~7 times, and I got an exatly same response everytime - meaning they don't read or care about your e mail!)

Well, I heard that rogers is not doing much better, so just choose anything you like.. Modem surely sucks worse than bad service

 

[SSP]

eelw, I've called Rogers service many times to get some info I needed, and my call always went through. No waiting on the lines for hours.

The only time I have to wait is if they have a serious problem like service outage (I had to wait 10 mins. Big deal... chew on something while you wait).

BTW - I've heard of the Bell's bad service from friends that use Bell HSE, I've never subscribed to Bell HSE.