home phone conglomerates

[Fishnut]

Conglomerates suck. I'm with one of them for home phone, internet and mobile. Yesterday a tech was doing work on that green tower thing in the neighbour's yard and my land line was full of statck. When he left, I had no dial tone at all and therefore NO INTERNET!!!!. I have talked to +ver a dozen customer service reps and the best they can do is get a tech over on wednesday morning.

I have been lied to twice by the reps saying their manager is on the phone and will call me back. I was lied to another time when I threatened to take my business to the other conglomerate as well. Basically I told her that if someone wasn't out tomorrow I would be taking my business elsewhere. She agreed but didn't actually change the tech's visit time, so now it's too late to be added tomorrow AND I have to call back again first thing in the morning.  So, tomorrow, I'm heading to the mall to the store where I hope an employee will be able to get to the right person to fix the situation. 

Would you take your business elsewhere or would you stick it out and demand a GREAT deal and make them beg to keep you as a customer?

[RedFish]

It's a tough decision.   I left one conglomerate for the other, the first one, "B" had incredibly bad customer service and took ages to resolve problems.   We are with "R" now, and very happy.   There have been problems but every one has been resolved very quickly, and they were quick to offer bonuses and deals to keep us happy.
If things went south with R and I decided to leave them, I would not go back to B because of the history with them.   So I would have to go with a smaller company and hope for the best.    Not a very helpful story I guess!

[lucius]

I'm with RedFish.  I had nothing but billing issues and lost "conversations' with that company.  Whenever I called in with technical issues, their answer was to upgrade my current package.  The service is much better with the red logo company.  I've never had weird outages of any sort.  And my cell phone is with none of the above.

[Hookup]

Both Bell and Rogers seem to have issues with service and customer service from time to time.  I switched from Rogers to teksavvy for Internet and it has been stable.  Rogers still has my home phone and cable TV, for now anyhow.

It's a lose-lose situation as far as my experiences go.  Both are equally bad at times, never has either been very good.  They run at acceptable or less.

IMO I would switch, unless an amazing $$ deal was presented.  The switch every 12 months game does work for some.  For me, I couldn't handle satilite going out every storm, so I won't go back to bell any time soon.

[Fishnut]

Well, I'm going on 36 hours now of no phone or internet. I'm positive they're just putting me off, apeasing me until my scheduled appointment on wednesday morning. The tech department person even went as far as telling me that there are no managers on staff for me to talk to. There never seems to be when I ask for one.

I called last night for the 12th time and I was told that dispatch is closed and to call back in the morning. I call back in the morning and am told that dispatch will call me within an hour. They actually did and promised to send someone between 1epm and 4pm. At 4:15 when nobody had shown up and I was told that the time black ended at 5pm. I call back at 5:05 and am told that the techs have a full plate and can work until 9pm, but I will be getting a calleither way. No call or tech by 9:45, so I call back. Dispatch is ofcourse closed and there is nothing that can be done...and no manager onstaff.

Yeah, we're jumping ship.

[Hookup]

I agree with you.  Sounds horrible.

They might offer you some insane deal to stay, which could be worth it. Good luck.

[lucius]

That's one thing about Bell I really didn't like, their short sales hours.  I work in Gatineau and live in Orleans and commute by bus.  Whenever I had a billing issue (which was often), there was no absolute way I would be able to call in during a weekday as they would be closed by the time I got home.  If I call in at work, I get 20 questions to confirm my identity because I was not calling from my home phone but at least I got someone I could understand.    So far (knock on wood), I haven't had any billing issues with Rogers and I have had one technical issue...disconnected my PVR because I didn't return my free rental in a timely manner. 

[Fishnut]

Well, when I got the manager on the phone this morning, she said there was nothing that could be done today and that I had no choice but wait until wednesday, so I said I wanted to cancel my account. She promptly sent me over to that department where there was no attempt to retain my business. She said that if I cancel that I would loose my number and might have to wait even longer before getting service.

So I decided to go see Rogers first. I decided to sign up for internet only because we're considering dropping the home phone completely. I actually got a MUCH better package for less money!!

Then I called to cancel the broken internet. I found out that there is a 30 day cancelation policy and that there was nothing that anyone, including a manager who could waive it...meaning I would have to pay for an additional month. When I got the manager on the phone, I told her my storry and it was waived. I felt bad because she is the only person I've spoken to who actually seemed to care. I was probably quite short with her at first.

[lucius]

You should be able to keep your home phone number.

http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/info_sht/t1023.htm

If you have a Bell email address, then you'll have to inform everbody what your new email is.

[Darth]

as long as the number is active, meaning there is no cancelation request the other provider can port the number over

[Greatwhite]

I switched everything to Rogers YEARS AGO when Bell started to become very needy...  I was getting calls when I was 1 day late on paying a bill, and threats of cancellation the 2nd time I was a little late.  Yeah, back then I was not very "on the ball" with paying bills...

Well, now with Rogers, I pay less for better service - and Rogers calls me every 4-6 months to see if there's anything that they can do to lower my bill.  The first time, they changed my cell's data plan because there was a deal on 6 gigs/month.  The second time, they couldn't lower anything - so gave me 6 months of the movie network free.  The third time, I still couldn't lower it, and I had TMN free, so they gave me 6 free pay per view movies.

In that time, Bell has drunk dialed me and sent me numerous "please come back!" letters.  I swear I have dated and broken up with some pretty unstable girls in my day, but Bell is worse...

[Nerine]

We have to be with bell because well, there's nobody else out here ((

Rogers & Bell are both silly business people and you have to watch your bills like a hawk, but I miss Rogers greatly!

Hoping you get your situation sorted out!! That sucks!! We get our phone up and running right away with Bell, longest we've been out was a weekend, but that was because they were repairing broken lines. and yes it goes down on a regular basis

[exv152]

Bell's customer service is not good, but if you have a large screen tv and you're looking for who has the better hd service, I'd say Bell does. In my experience, I've tried both and if you have anything above a 40" screen, picture quality is very noticeable. They also make better receivers imo.

[Greatwhite]

Bell's customer service is not good, but if you have a large screen tv and you're looking for who has the better hd service, I'd say Bell does. In my experience, I've tried both and if you have anything above a 40" screen, picture quality is very noticeable. They also make better receivers imo.

... Neither Bell or Rogers are in the "making receivers" business... But I know what you mean.  In my experience though, the new Rogers receivers are MUCH better than anything I've seen from Bell.  Too bad I bought my receivers from Rogers about a month before the new ones came out.

[Darth]

Bell's customer service is not good, but if you have a large screen tv and you're looking for who has the better hd service, I'd say Bell does. In my experience, I've tried both and if you have anything above a 40" screen, picture quality is very noticeable. They also make better receivers imo.

I would have to disagree tv is tv,  the signal being recieved is the same, its all about the tv you have

[Stussi613]

the new Rogers receivers are MUCH better than anything I've seen from Bell.  Too bad I bought my receivers from Rogers about a month before the new ones came out.

Are you talng about the Nextbox?  I had the hole home PVR from Rogrs for nearly a year before switching to Bell...they update every night at 1:04 and reboot after the update.  You can't record anything that has 1:04am as part of its schedule. Ever.  With time shifting we used to schedule things we couldn't record due to the two recordings at a time limitation and when we went to Nextbox we had to stop doing it and watch shows on demand.  For the last two months of having the Nextbox it would frequently reboot and erase all recorded shows and cancel scheduled recordings randomly.

The Bell standard receivers may not be as slick, but they are rock solid and the search feature destroys the Rogers guide.

Bell is going to be launching Fibe TV in wider distribution in Ottawa in the spring and its going to kill Rogers, IMO.  My sister has a new house in Trails Edge that has Fibe and its 150% better than Rogers, we are going to switch to it here in Kanata as soon as it launches.

I hate to disagree Eric, but the picture quality on Bell is light years better than Rogers...

[JetJumper]

I would have to disagree tv is tv,  the signal being recieved is the same, its all about the tv you have

the signal feed isn't the same.    I work in that industry.  The encoders they use to convert the raw video source into a MPEG Transport streams can be set anywere from 1Mbit/sec to 30+Mbit/sec.  Depending on how much space segment they want to pay for they can run each channel at 3Mbit/sec - 4Mbit/sec - 5Mbit/sec etc...

I don't know what Bell / Rogers broadcasts their channels at but I do know it can differ.  Standard HD feed I do believe ranges from 5-7Mbit/sec..

[Greatwhite]

Are you talng about the Nextbox?  I had the hole home PVR from Rogrs for nearly a year before switching to Bell...they update every night at 1:04 and reboot after the update.  You can't record anything that has 1:04am as part of its schedule. Ever.  With time shifting we used to schedule things we couldn't record due to the two recordings at a time limitation and when we went to Nextbox we had to stop doing it and watch shows on demand.  For the last two months of having the Nextbox it would frequently reboot and erase all recorded shows and cancel scheduled recordings randomly.
...
I hate to disagree Eric, but the picture quality on Bell is light years better than Rogers...

Yeah, I'm talking about what they call the Nextbox... The HD PVR that was out before they rebranded them as Nextbox 2.0 is the one I've seen.  The guide change that they pushed out a few months ago is very slick, as is the "recorded shows" section.  I didn't know of the 1:04am reboot, which is silly. 

My buddy has the receiver that I'm thinking of, and his only complaint is that it's not always 100% accurate in the "available space" calculation, and it won't start recording a show if there's not enough room on the drive.  This causes the system to think there isn't enough room, and then he missed recording some shows that he was looking forward to.  Granted, he & his family keep WAY TOO MANY SHOWS on their PVR because their kid likes to watch the same things over and over...

I haven't seen the pictures side by side to compare Bell with Rogers, so I can't really comment on the picture quality -- and I don't know who Eric is, so I really shouldn't comment on the picture quality at all...

[Fishnut]

Well, I finally have internet and home phone back.  Good thing because mu thumbs were getting really tired typing so much on the blackberry.

Surprisingly, the bell tech guy showed up yesterday (christmas day) and fixed the problem.  Yes, it was just as I suspected.  The tech who had been upgrading something in that tower in the neighbour's yard did something that knocked us off.  So I had my internet back yesterday in time to find out what the boxing day deals are!!

This morning Rogers showed up to hook us up to their internet and he ran some new cable out to the box for us because the old cable was significantly weakening the signal...apparently.

We don't have cable TV...at least we don't pay for it.  When we bought the house the signal had not been stopped and it was an analog signal.  We figured it was just an oversight by rogers that wouldn't last long.  6 years later, we still have it.  Still analog but free non the less!!  Last night we disconnected everything so the rogers guy wouldn't suspect anything is being used so as soon as hubby is finished configuring the modem we have, we'll try re-doing everything and see if we still have that free signal.  The line, according to rogers, was cold...meaning there was no signal coming to the house at all.

We're still considering dropping our home phone.  If we do and we don't have free cable any more, we might just subscribe since it's not going to be that much more than we're currently paying for the home phone.

[Dan]

Just a quick tip for everyone....

TIP 1: If you do decide to "make the switch" and you want to keep the same phone number, do not cancel with current company first because when you do they return your phone number to "the pool of available numbers" immediately. You simply tell the new company that you want number 123 and that it's under your name with company x. They will make the switch for you and you will have your old number. There is nothing you can do if you had canceled with the first company first and your phone number got picked up by someone else before your new company tried to get it for you.

TIP 2: Next time you have trouble tell them or if ever you do switch that you will only stay/sign on with them if they draw up a new contract with you that does not have the 30 cancellation penalty and that you want this to ensure that you will get good service in the future (they all do this - if you dump them, you get a nice invoice for an extra 30 to 60 days of service even though you are no longer with them and independent of how long you have been with them).  They will agree to waiving this (my whole family has this : even split Bell, Rogers, Videotron). You can thank me if ever you do decide that you are really fed up and want to switch!