The IT Nerd

After my latest Rogers outage combined with the nationwide outage that they had, my wife and I had had enough of dealing with Rogers. The reason is that my wife and I work from home and reliable Internet and telco services is a must for us. So far, not counting the nationwide outage, we’ve lost Rogers services four times this year. Sometimes for as long as half a day. That doesn’t meet the bar when it comes to reliability. Thus we made the call to go to Bell. Now I will admit that we did have a very negative experience trying to move to Bell recently. But at this point, I was going to try again because staying on Rogers is no longer an option. And I say “I” because this was now my problem to solve as my wife doesn’t want to deal with Bell because what happened the last time.

Now I started out with ordering online again. I chose Internet and home phone as that is all we need, and we’re taking this opportunity to dump TV as we don’t watch TV via Ignite TV anymore. The package would have cost us $167 a month which is a savings from the $220 that we’re currently paying with Rogers. So I put the order in after picking an install date which ended up being this Friday. When I got the email, I noticed two things right away. The first is that the contact number which I typed in was converted to 999-999-9999. Now I know that I didn’t type that in as I screen recorded everything that I did. So clearly the Bell system changed that. The second thing was that they issued a new number for the home phone. That’s a #fail as I wanted my existing number ported from Rogers. Thus I was forced to call into Bell.

Now I am convinced that Bell does this so that you are forced to call in so that they can upsell you to death. So my plan was to get them to focus on sorting out the issue with the order out first, and then deal with the upselling later. That plan worked for the most part. Let me give you a play by play:

• The person who I got on the line tried to modify my order, but couldn’t do that. Thus he claims he was forced to create a new order. But what sucks about this is that he also couldn’t cancel the order that I put in online, and I would have to call back in tomorrow or later tonight to cancel the order. I question why Bell doesn’t have a way to nuke the order themselves and force the customer to do it. In any case, I’ll be calling them tomorrow and I will let you know how that goes.
• So once he sorted out the order which included porting my existing home phone number from Rogers, and putting in proper contact info for the installer, the upselling began. He tried to get me to add on TV as well as move our cell phones from Telus to Bell under the guise of the more services that I had with Bell, the more money I would save. Or put another way, they want to get you to spend more of your money and you “save” money. I wasn’t interested in either of those options as we won’t have all our telco services with one provider as I outlined here. What however he did offer was a bump to 1.5 Gbps down/940 Mbps up Internet service for $49.95 a month for 24 months. After that the price goes up to 84.95 a month. This is down from their list price of $134.95 which is the list price on the Bell website. I also went for a better home phone package with North American calling and services like call waiting and caller ID for $56.56 a month.
• My install date was moved to next Thursday morning.

Total time invested: 44 minutes on the phone call. 10 minutes on the web.

Now there were some sneaky things that Bell did. The first one is that they added on the Bell FibeTV app to the deal. Now you’re likely saying “didn’t you just say that you didn’t want TV service?” I did. But they slip it in as almost a “oh by the way” sort of thing that they are hoping that you won’t notice. But when you look at the email that they send over confirming the order, you’ll notice this:

So the Fibe TV app with Crave TV which is Bell’s streaming service is $30 a month. But you get a $20 credit for six months, and a $4.95 credit for having two Bell services, which means that it drops the price to $10 a month. Why is this important? Let’s look at what I’m being charged for the home phone:

If you look at the two discounts, you’ll see that they mention that these are discounts for having three Bell services. As in TV, Internet, and home phone. So basically they’re forcing you into using the Bell TV app so that you get some “savings”. I guess it helps to boost their TV and Crave TV subscriber numbers and make them a couple of extra bucks. Especially after the six month promo for Crave TV expires. I’ll be nuking the Bell TV app before the new year after I’ve binge watched a bunch of things and I’ll eat the $20.49 in “savings” that I am getting now.

Let’s get to the final price. With all of the “savings” accounted for I am paying $116.51 a month. This is way less than the $222 a month that I was paying with Rogers. But that Rogers price includes TV as I am not “officially” getting TV with Bell. And the price will go up in 2 years time. But at that time I will call in and go through their retentions department to get a better deal.

Here’s a free pro tip: Everyone should call their telco to cut a better deal with them every year or two and be prepared to move telcos if they don’t as that’s the only way to save money on your telco bill.

My take on this is that some of what you see above falls under the category of being sketchy. I say that because the agent that I spoke to is clearly trained to focus me on the price of the package that you get and not look too closely on the details. And if you question anything, they refocus you back on to the price of the package. While I will admit that the price that this guy quoted to me on the phone is what is on the email, the way he got to that price doesn’t sit too well with me. And this is another thing that doesn’t sit well with me is this:

So Bell has the right to increase your price with 30 days notice. Maybe as that part of the above paragraph says “if required”. Thus the way I read this is that Bell will increase your bill at some point. Another reason for me to be ready to call in to cut a new deal if required.

As mentioned above, my install is set for next Thursday and I will update you on how that goes. Along with how detailing how I tie in Bell’s services into my network because there’s zero chance I will use Bell’s hardware to power my home network. At the same time, I have a feeling that Rogers will be giving us a call as we’re porting our home phone number away from them which will trigger them to perhaps call and figure out how to retain us as customers. I’ll update you if that happens as well.

This entry was posted on July 19, 2022 at 3:45 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Bell, Rogers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.