The IT Nerd

If you’re a long time reader of this blog, you’ll know that I started out having Bell DSL Internet and home phone a very long time ago. And because of a rather negative experience when my phone went out of service, I dumped Bell for Teksavvy. This was in 2009. And only because Rogers took the entire country offline a couple of years ago did I return to Bell. And this was despite the fact that a previous attempt to return to Bell went off the rails. Though the process to do that was not exactly the best customer experience possible, and it as also full of attempts to upsell me. But at the end I got Bell Fibe installed and it worked well for our needs. Though that’s when I also confirmed that Bell’s customer service wasn’t that great at times. Other times it was brilliant.

So that brings me to today where I am dumping Bell for a second time. And it’s due to price. Now when I signed up for Bell, I was paying the following when I first signed up for Bell:

• 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.
• A home phone package with North American calling and services like call waiting and caller ID for $56.56 a month.
• TV, which I didn’t want but they slipped in for $10 a month to facilitate a bunch of discounts.

The bottom line is that I started out paying $116.51 a month with Bell including taxes. But fast forward to today and I am paying $192.10. That’s because of Bell’s seemingly random price increases and the expiration of various promotional credits added over $75 a month to my bill. That’s a non-starter in today’s economy. And asking Bell for a better deal is also a non-starter because like a lot of Canadian telcos these days, they won’t try to keep you as a customer. Instead, they would rather let you go to another telco and try to win you back. I spoke about this here, but in short Canadian telcos don’t care about retaining customers. They only care about making as much money as they possibly can before those customers leave for another telco. Then trying to win you back so that it looks like you’re a new customer. Knowing that, I am forced to switch providers if I want to lower my telco costs.

Enter Distributel. They’re owned by Bell and use Bell’s infrastructure. But they for the most part don’t behave like Bell. And according to Reddit, they also seem to have decent customer service unlike Bell. But most importantly, they don’t cost nearly as much as Bell. So after looking at their website and giving them a call, I walked away with this:

• Internet: 1 Gbps down / 750 Mbps up – $69.95 a month. A WiFi pod is included for free.
• Home Phone: Free local calling and 500 minutes of North American Calling – $25 a month with the first month free.
• They are waving my install and shipping fees (to ship their hardware to me).
• They will work with Bell to cancel my Bell service. Which isn’t surprising as it’s technically the same company.

So with taxes my monthly bill should be just over $100 a month. Compared to what Bell is charging me, that’s a no brainer. Now I should point a couple of things out:

• Distributel appears to use YAK for their telephone service. Which makes this a VoIP type system. That means that if the Internet is out or the power is out, I have no home phone. Which is fine as that is the situation that I have with Bell right now. And I mitigate some of that by having a UPS as described here.
• Some of you will say that I am giving up speed on my Internet connection because I’m dropping from 1.5 Gbps down/940 Mbps up. The fact is that I am unlikely to notice a difference because of what I argue here. In short, nobody really needs anything over 500 Mbps up or down because you are highly unlikely to ever fully max out a 500Mbps connection, never mind anything faster.

I was on the phone with Distributel for about half an hour or so, and they had also committed to porting my home phone number, sending me their hardware, and booking a service appointment for the 25th of October in the afternoon subject to confirmation. During this time, I never felt pressured to get services that I didn’t need, and the rep explained everything to me in detail and answered any question that I had. This is the exact opposite experience that I had with Bell when I moved to them from Rogers. It’s shocking to believe that Distributel is owned by Bell.

So what happens now? Well I will wait for confirmation of my service appointment, and I will document how that appointment goes. I don’t expect it to be long as I already have Bell Fibe in my condo. And since they use Bell’s infrastructure, it shouldn’t hard to make the switch. The other thing that I expect is a phone call from Bell with a “winback” offer. For now I will ignore that as I want to give Distributel a fair shot as so far things seem positive with them.

As I said, I will be updating you on how the install goes along with anything else technical and non-technical that I encounter. Stay tuned for that.

This entry was posted on October 19, 2024 at 8:47 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Bell. 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.