After 11 years with Rogers we pulled the internet plug and are trying Bell. Yes, there have been problems with the Bell installation, but if you know Toronto, Rogers and Bell you should have expected problems, and I did. In summary Bell Fibe does work, sort of, but my upload speed is no more than .7 MBps, 7% of what they told me I would get. There is also nothing I can do increase the upload speed. Apparently because I live 1.2 km from the central office the upload speed cannot increase, yet they did not tell me this when I signed up. I have been a Bell landline phone customer for 15 years, so they should be fully aware of my location.
After years with Rogers I thought I would change to see if there was any other company that could provide better service for my internet. I suspected it was an uphill battle, and I was not wrong. I had Rogers Express internet service, 25Mmps download speed, 2 Mbps upload speed, 80GB bandwidth cap. Of course these numbers were simple dreams. On a daily basis I was getting 7.7Mbps download and .55Mbps upload, which fluctuates during the day.
Competition: TechSavvy also uses the Rogers broadband line, and did not appear to have much increase in performance. They have an activation fee and you must buy your own modem from their approval list. If you buy a modem from a store instead of them there is a higher charge. Acanac and TechSavvy can use your Bell DSL line. Basically, they all use either the Rogers broadband or the Bell copper wire into your house. My Chinese neighbours use Xinflix, which has a transfer fee and also uses Rogers Cable.
Bell’s Offering: I signed up for Bell Fibe 15/10, supposedly 15Mbps download and 10MBps upload, 60BG bandwidth limit. After 4 days of fiddling with Bell Tech support I am able to get 15Mbps download but only a max of .7Mbps upload. This is not what the sales people told be, which was 15Mbps download and 10Mbps upload. Their upload speed is a total lie.
The Installation: Contrary to the “Fibe” name, there is no fiber optic to be found. The installer still uses your standard twisted pair copper wire, the very same one you use for your telephone. Your incoming line is connected to a filtering box, which then splits into phone or DSL internet. There is fiber-optic cable from the central office to my local hub, which is 800m away from my house. The rest of the way from the hub to my house is good old, and I mean old, twisted pair copper wire. It would be more appropriate to rename “Bell Fibe” to “Bell Fib”, to correspond to the blatant lieing that Bell markets to us.
The installer mildly annoyed me by not having an electric drill to attach the filter box to my electrical panel. Instead he used a hand screwdriver, and when he could not securely attach the filter he left it loose. I had to get my electric drill to finish the job. He could have gone the extra 30 seconds to do a proper job but did not.
Copper Wires: My copper wire was so brittle that when the installer wiggled it our home phone stopped working. We then found out soon after that one of the pair had broken. Ok, a simple stripping of wire housing and we got our phone back. Still, these wires are old, and in my case, were not solidly attached, so over the space of 15-20 years, they had degraded. I had to ask the installer to solidly attach the line to my house. He used a cable tie, which was Ok.
The modem router is a Sagemcom F@st 2864, which came with no manual at all. There are some very skimpy quick installation instructions from Bell, but I wanted to know how to configure the modem from an IP address. The installer did not know how to get into the modem, so we had to wait about 20 minutes for the modem ID and password. I provided him with the IP address, which he did not know. The installer had hand written the POPe ID and password onto the form for my order, but his writing was not legible. Was that a numeric “6” or “b”? An “S” or “5”? Numeric “1”, lower case “l”? I had to call Bell again to have them reset and verify the password.
Note that the Sagemcom modem-router comes with some very fundamental software that does not allow for parental controls. I have daisy chained my regular router to the Sagemcom and therefore am only using it as a modem.
Overall I like the 15Mbps download speed from Bell, where I was getting at best 7.7Mbps and usually 3Mbps in the evenings with Rogers. The upload speed from Bell is a great disappointment. They knew where I lived, had the ability to very accurately estimate my upload speed, did not tell me these facts until 3 days after the installation and still they can only provide 7% of the upload speed they sold to me. This is clearly false advertisement. As I have not had Bell internet for very long I cannot comment on its stability.
With a monopoly on internet access to your home, there is not much we Canadians can do to change the situation. Other competitors use the Rogers or Bell infrastructure. When this oligopoly complains about unfair marketing practices for future competitors, this seems ironic when they are cheating their customers. Canadians complain about the predatory practices of both Bell and Rogers, and these practices continue today.
Addendum 2017 Jan 30: Bell Fibe 50 Home Installation: Toronto, Canada I have upgraded to Bell Fibe 50. it is really good. Still we really don’t need 50mbps as I cannot tell the speed difference between 15mbps and 50mbps!
Was looking for reviews on the Sagemcom modem and happened across your blog. Many years ago I found Velcom. They are an ISP and have been pretty good to me save a short period of time when they outsourced their tech support where you know they were just reading solutions off of a computer. Of course they will use the Bell or Rogers infrastructure.
The reason I am replying at all is simply to say that maybe you can get better service from a company like this instead of that provided by Bell who I used until ’05. Anyhoo, from one guy who gets tired of dealing with the big faceless conglomerates, I offer one more option for you. They can be found at www. velcom.ca. Good luck with your net.
Kevin.
I just recently signed up with Bell Fibe (25/10), and here is what I finally realized. 25mbps means megabits per second. This translates to about 3.1 megabytes per second. Not as stunningly fast as I had expected, and not as fast as the Rogers Cable I left behind. I think it is false advertising. They are hoping that people are confused about what everything means.
[Hi Sam. Please confirm your download and upload speed using http://www.speedtest.net/ because when I started my Bell service I was getting 10mbps download and 0.12 mbps upload. They can speed up your line, to a point where they get more collisions, and they did this to mine. Unfortunately for me they told me I was too far from their central switching office to give me a reasonable upload speed, so I am stuck with 0.17 mbps, a far cry from the 10mbps they sold me. Though I feel cheated there is not a lot I can do. Their advertisement says “up to” for all their upload and download speeds. Since I have not moved for over a decade and I am a Bell phone customer you would think that they would know where I live and could calculate my upload speed before I signed up, but they seem to not be able to do this.
I do not miss the nasty Rogers call centre staff that gave me endless frustration. For this I switched to Bell. If you feel, after a couple of months your speed is not as fast as Rogers you can switch back.
What is misleading is that Bell touts it’s “Bell Fibe”, very similar to fiber optics. There is no such technology anywhere near my house, only copper twister pair. Don]
Good comments guys. I guess I lucked out in that I was at the “end of the loop” for many years but lucky for me now a hub is very close by and I do indeed get ‘faster than advertised’ speeds (both up and down). But, it wasn’t always that way, so I feel for you both. Unless you live in a really new condo, there will be no fiber lines anywhere near you and, most likely never will be as all these companies continue to develop better compression structures for use over copper (Fiber optic lines are expensive). All one can do is wait and insist that you get changed to a new hub/concentrator as quickly as possible. The new Sagemcom modem/router appears to work just fine (tweaking is always required).
Feel your pain. In Scarborough with bell and I desperately want high upload so I can stream, upload youtube videos etc. but there is absolutely nothing I can do short of moving from a place I’ve lived in since 1997.
My uncle in Markham gets the full 15/10
Scarborough isn’t that backwater so I really don’t understand it. Been with bell since November 2000 and have had this problem since… but otherwise their service is great.