Last week I posted a story about dumping Bell for Distributel. And I mentioned that I would have the install done today. That did happen and here’s how it went.
Distributel had scheduled Bell to come out to do the install between noon and 5PM today. And they did confirm that on Monday. But they had also sent me a box with two items in it which arrived on Monday:
This is a Deco AX3000 WiFi access point and router by TP-Link. I didn’t plug it in as I had zero intention of using it. But I could get more than one of these at the time that I ordered to deliver mesh WiFi. After that, I would have to rent them from Distributel.
This is an analog telephone adapter made by a company called Grandstream which would allow me to plug my phones into Distributel’s VoIP service. I would actually be using this as home phone service is important to us.
Now once the Bell tech arrived, he disconnected my HH4000 and did some tests. Then he went downstairs to the building’s telephone room to do something. I have no clue what. Then he came back and plugged this in.
This is a Nokia ONT or optical networking terminal. In layman’s terms, it converts fibre optic to Ethernet. And the one big plus to this is that once I plugged my router in and made some changes, I would be connected to Distributel’s Internet service. That’s more civilized than having to find ways to get past Bell’s hardware using either method to do that.
Now setting things up isn’t hard. But it’s not something the average person would do. Having said that, here’s what I did to get this working. Distributel appears to run on Bell’s fibre via its own VLAN or virtual LAN. In layman’s terms, it’s an isolated virtual network that’s part of a larger network. So if you use your own router like I am, you need to specify that inside the configuration for your router. Since I am using an Asus ZenWiFi XT8, I had to find the place inside the router’s configuration pages to specify the VLAN. I ultimately found it here:
I had to go to LAN and then click on the IPTV tab. Why Asus put it there, I have no idea. But anyway, Distributel appears to require you to enter a VID value of 40 for the Internet as pictured above after changing the ISP profile to manual. Then under special applications I set it up the way it is pictured above. I then pressed apply. Before I declare victory, there’s one more thing that I needed to do:
Because Distributel is a Bell company, they of course use PPPoE. So I had to snag my PPPoE username and password from the Distributel eCare website, which I was smart enough to register for prior to the install and enter the username and password on the page above which you get to by going to WAN on the left and Internet Connection and changing the WAN Connection type to PPPoE. The place to enter the username and password is under Account Settings.
After I did that, I was live. Though it did take about 20 minutes for the Nokia ONT to work due to multiple software updates that it required. The total time invested in this install was about 90 minutes from start to finish. And of course, I did a speed test to see what speeds I was getting.
So because I was using PPPoE, I was expecting a hit in terms of my upload speed. And based on this, the 1 Gbps downstream/750 Mbps upstream that I am paying for was leaving about 200 Mbps upstream speed on the table. That’s purely down to my Asus hardware and its inability to handle PPPoE traffic. Which is a bit of an incentive to move off of Asus hardware to something better able to handle this traffic. And in case you’re wondering why I am not using the TP-Link gear that Distributel sent me, I never use ISP hardware if I can possibly avoid it because I don’t want to be locked into their gear and whatever security issues come with that gear.
So with that part done, I needed to turn my attention to Bell. When I first called Distributel, they said that they would take care of cancelling all my services. But I had a suspicion that this wasn’t true. Thus I called back and it turns out that they would only cancel my home phone, and everything else was on me. Not the biggest deal in the world but Distributel needs to train their agents to deliver the correct information 100% of the time. In any case, I called Bell and when I pressed the options to cancel my account, I got dumped to retentions. They then asked me if I was interested in hearing what specials that they had and I blew them off. I was kind of surprised by that because my experience with my clients is that Bell is usually dismissive of customers who leave. As in if you want to leave, go ahead sort of dismissive. Then they call days or weeks later with a “winback” deal. But that seems to have have changed recently if they are trying to retain me as I am going out the door. Having said that, I am certain that I will be receiving a bunch of calls in the next few days and weeks to try and lure me back. Now beyond that, I also got via email what I needed to send my HH4000 back to them, which I will do next week.
I’ll let you know how it goes with Distributel. So far almost everything that they said that they were going to do has been delivered. I’ll be watching to see if that continues.
My Distributel Install Is Done…. Here’s How It Went
Posted in Commentary with tags Distributel on October 25, 2024 by itnerdLast week I posted a story about dumping Bell for Distributel. And I mentioned that I would have the install done today. That did happen and here’s how it went.
Distributel had scheduled Bell to come out to do the install between noon and 5PM today. And they did confirm that on Monday. But they had also sent me a box with two items in it which arrived on Monday:
This is a Deco AX3000 WiFi access point and router by TP-Link. I didn’t plug it in as I had zero intention of using it. But I could get more than one of these at the time that I ordered to deliver mesh WiFi. After that, I would have to rent them from Distributel.
This is an analog telephone adapter made by a company called Grandstream which would allow me to plug my phones into Distributel’s VoIP service. I would actually be using this as home phone service is important to us.
Now once the Bell tech arrived, he disconnected my HH4000 and did some tests. Then he went downstairs to the building’s telephone room to do something. I have no clue what. Then he came back and plugged this in.
This is a Nokia ONT or optical networking terminal. In layman’s terms, it converts fibre optic to Ethernet. And the one big plus to this is that once I plugged my router in and made some changes, I would be connected to Distributel’s Internet service. That’s more civilized than having to find ways to get past Bell’s hardware using either method to do that.
Now setting things up isn’t hard. But it’s not something the average person would do. Having said that, here’s what I did to get this working. Distributel appears to run on Bell’s fibre via its own VLAN or virtual LAN. In layman’s terms, it’s an isolated virtual network that’s part of a larger network. So if you use your own router like I am, you need to specify that inside the configuration for your router. Since I am using an Asus ZenWiFi XT8, I had to find the place inside the router’s configuration pages to specify the VLAN. I ultimately found it here:
I had to go to LAN and then click on the IPTV tab. Why Asus put it there, I have no idea. But anyway, Distributel appears to require you to enter a VID value of 40 for the Internet as pictured above after changing the ISP profile to manual. Then under special applications I set it up the way it is pictured above. I then pressed apply. Before I declare victory, there’s one more thing that I needed to do:
Because Distributel is a Bell company, they of course use PPPoE. So I had to snag my PPPoE username and password from the Distributel eCare website, which I was smart enough to register for prior to the install and enter the username and password on the page above which you get to by going to WAN on the left and Internet Connection and changing the WAN Connection type to PPPoE. The place to enter the username and password is under Account Settings.
After I did that, I was live. Though it did take about 20 minutes for the Nokia ONT to work due to multiple software updates that it required. The total time invested in this install was about 90 minutes from start to finish. And of course, I did a speed test to see what speeds I was getting.
So because I was using PPPoE, I was expecting a hit in terms of my upload speed. And based on this, the 1 Gbps downstream/750 Mbps upstream that I am paying for was leaving about 200 Mbps upstream speed on the table. That’s purely down to my Asus hardware and its inability to handle PPPoE traffic. Which is a bit of an incentive to move off of Asus hardware to something better able to handle this traffic. And in case you’re wondering why I am not using the TP-Link gear that Distributel sent me, I never use ISP hardware if I can possibly avoid it because I don’t want to be locked into their gear and whatever security issues come with that gear.
So with that part done, I needed to turn my attention to Bell. When I first called Distributel, they said that they would take care of cancelling all my services. But I had a suspicion that this wasn’t true. Thus I called back and it turns out that they would only cancel my home phone, and everything else was on me. Not the biggest deal in the world but Distributel needs to train their agents to deliver the correct information 100% of the time. In any case, I called Bell and when I pressed the options to cancel my account, I got dumped to retentions. They then asked me if I was interested in hearing what specials that they had and I blew them off. I was kind of surprised by that because my experience with my clients is that Bell is usually dismissive of customers who leave. As in if you want to leave, go ahead sort of dismissive. Then they call days or weeks later with a “winback” deal. But that seems to have have changed recently if they are trying to retain me as I am going out the door. Having said that, I am certain that I will be receiving a bunch of calls in the next few days and weeks to try and lure me back. Now beyond that, I also got via email what I needed to send my HH4000 back to them, which I will do next week.
I’ll let you know how it goes with Distributel. So far almost everything that they said that they were going to do has been delivered. I’ll be watching to see if that continues.
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