The IT Nerd

Starting on March 8th, I’ve been having consistent issues with the Internet service that is provided by Distributel, who is owned by Bell. Basically what would happen is that my connection would disconnect. Then it may reconnect on its own 15 minutes later. Or it may reconnect only if I power cycle the optical networking terminal which in layman’s terms converts fibre to ethernet. And this would happen as much as a dozen times a day. Now fibre should be ultra reliable. So I know something was seriously wrong. But as I found out, getting it fixed would be a nightmare.

First let me address the title. It really did 13 calls and a month of my life for Bell and Distributel to (hopefully) fix this. Each time I would call into Distributel, I was guaranteed to lose at least 45 minutes of my time that I would never get back because after some brief troubleshooting, I would be placed on hold while the tech support person called Bell to look at the line remotely. Then they would rebuild my speed profile each time and declare the problem fixed. But it was never truly fixed. It may stay up for an hour, or it may stay up for a day or two. One time it stayed up for 11 days. The longer that this went on, I figured that it must be me. So since I do IT for a living. Thus I did this troubleshooting:

• I got a friend who works with fibre to check the fibre cable that ran from where it enters my condo to where my equipment is. That was fine.
• I put back the TP-Link hardware that Distributel shipped over when I first got their service to see if that would change anything. It didn’t.
• I had Ubiquiti swap out my Cloud Gateway Max seeing as I purchased the UI Care extended warranty. That made no difference either.
• I also swapped ethernet cables and the like.

After doing all of this, I concluded that this was clearly a Bell issue.

What made this worse is that it was also clear that Bell did not want to send out a tech to figure out what was going on. I get that’s expensive and Canadian telcos are loathe to do that. But when you can’t figure the issue out over the phone, you should just go ahead and and do that. On top of that, when I tried to escalate the issue within Bell, I was met with some of the worst possible customer service I have ever experienced. For example, one tier two Bell tech support person said the problem was my fault because I plugged my hardware into an uninterruptible power supply. Well, that’s a #fail on his part for two reasons. One, Bell themselves recommends that you do that as you can see here. Two, an uninterruptible power supply or UPS for short has the following benefits as per this:

1. Voltage spike or sustained overvoltage
2. Momentary or sustained reduction in input voltage
3. Voltage sag
4. Noise, defined as a high frequency transient or oscillation, usually injected into the line by nearby equipment
5. Instability of the mains frequency
6. Harmonic distortion, defined as a departure from the ideal sinusoidal waveform expected on the line

So in short, your equipment is better off when plugged into a UPS. So why would someone from Bell say the opposite? My guess is that it is a way for him to get me off the phone and not actually address the problem as that allows him to close a ticket and improve his metrics. As well as avoid sending out a tech as he likely gets evaluated on that too. I will also note that this individual was extremely rude about it and disconnected the call when I dared to point out that what he was saying was factually incorrect.

This brings me to another point. The dynamics of Distributel versus the dynamics of Bell. While Bell was not helpful, and as per the example sometimes rude, the staff at Distributel were friendly and generally pleasant to deal with. Though I will say that a couple of them did not follow through on promises that they made. For example one of them promised to have a manager call me when I wanted to escalate the issue on their end. That never happened. Another promised that he would demand that Bell send out a tech. That never happened and rebuilt my profile again. One of the most important rules of providing customer service is to never say you’re going to do something and not follow through as that never ever ends well for the organization that you work for.

On top of that, Distributel employees openly criticized Bell employees. By openly, I mean while was on the phone with them. A lot of them said the quality of the service they got from Bell has nosedived over the years since Bell started outsourcing everything overseas. Or calling Bell employees “not well trained.” This kind of shocked me because Distributel is owned by Bell and these calls are being recorded. Which means that the potential for someone a few rungs up the ladder finding out should be high. But I am guessing that these Distributel employees either don’t care or nobody is listening to those recordings and they know that. Whatever the reason, this appears to highlight some serious problems within Bell that will affect customers in a negative way.

Let’s fast forward to call number 13. The person that I got finally was able to convince Bell to send a tech to figure out what was going on. His suspicion based on everything that I told him was that the optical networking terminal was the issue, and that Bell needed to swap it. A day and a half later the tech arrived and my wife was there to greet him. This tech tested everything from top to bottom, and he was going to leave because everything was working according to him. But unfortunately for him he was dealing with my wife who is kind of like The Doctor from the British sci-fi series Doctor Who. The Doctor gives you one chance to do the right thing, and if you don’t, The Doctor goes scorched Earth on you. In his case, he failed to grasp that this was an intermittent problem and she went scorched Earth on him and backed him into the position of swapping the optical networking terminal. The fact that according to her, he said that doing that was going to be an inconvenience to him as he would have to go to his truck to get one, and then he might miss out on another repair order (likely because he was a contractor who is paid by the repair order) did not help his cause. But he did do the swap of the optical networking terminal and he did note that the new optical networking terminal that he installed was substantially cooler than its predecessor. Perhaps that one was overheating due to some sort of fault? Who knows. As it stands as I type this, I have not had a single disconnect. Not one. If it continues like this for 30 days, I will declare this issue fixed.

But if the Internet continues to be problematic, then my wife and I will switch back to Rogers on a temporary basis. I say that because cable Internet would be a serious downgrade from fibre Internet in terms of speed (especially upstream where speeds can be a quarter of the downstream speeds at best) and latency (fibre has a latency of 3ms or less while cable can be 5 times as high or more which negatively affects anything from video calls to gaming). But more importantly, it will be temporary because I have begun to champion bringing Beanfield into the building. This is a company that runs fibre internet that they control from end to end into condos like ours. So during the month that this was going on, I had conversations with the condo board who unknown to me wanted a third option for residents. Apparently they have fielded complaints from residents who go back and forth between Bell and Rogers and don’t feel that they are getting quality telco services from either company. Thus to the board, my suggestion of going to Beanfield made sense. They’ve already touched based with the company and a meeting with them is scheduled for next week in order to explore how to execute this and what it will take to get it done. Once they’re in the building, my wife and I will be moving to them. And I suspect that others in the building will as well. That might send chills down the spines of Rogers and Bell execs. Or they may not care. I guess we’re about to find out.

One final thing, in the middle of all this, I attempted to reach out to a contact at Bell to tell her of my issue, the fact that I was having problems getting a resolution to said issue, a request to point me to someone who could help, and I was going to go public with this. I didn’t hear from her so I went public. Now some of you may say that I’m trying to pull rank because I am a public figure. And you’re 100% correct. I do have that option and I have exercised it at times out of desperation. But the general public doesn’t have that option which illustrates the state of customer service in the telco industry where Joe Average who is in a situation like mine has not a lot of options to escalate and issue and get a timely resolution. That needs to change, either through telcos making the choice that they must do better, or forcing it upon them via competition. My condo is doing the latter via Beanfield because we have the ability to do that. You may not as lucky as we are. For those in the latter category, that really needs to change and change now.