The IT Nerd

You might have been following my coverage of Bell’s rollout of the new Gigahub which is the hardware that they supply to their Bell Fibe customers. Out of the box, it had issues. And I put out a request for help identifying these issues as I was getting a lot of emails asking for help. Ultimately Bell identified these issues via a Bell employee who frequents the DSLReports.com forums called “Bell_Dom”. A firmware update then came out that fixed the initial rollout had. But you had an ask for it.

That seems to have changed in the last few days as according to this thread on DSLReports.com, Bell appears to be rolling this out widely. The firmware is version 1.7.8.1 and it is specific to the Gigahub. One bonus of this new firmware is that it finally fixes the issue of WiFi re-enabling when you reboot the Gigahub. That’s something that I wish that Bell would bring that down to the HH4000 as that bug is annoying.

Have you received this update on your Gigahub? What has your experience been? Please leave a comment below and share your experience.

It’s been six months since my wife and I dumped Rogers Ignite Internet to replace it with Bell Fibe 1.5 Gbps Internet. And to be honest, there’s only been a handful of things to report on. That includes this incident where a Bell tech’s incompetence left us without service for several hours.

Let’s start with the good. For the most part, the speed that I got on day one is the same speed that I have now. And neither my wife or I have had any incidents since the one that I mentioned above. I continue to use the advanced DMZ method of bypassing Bell’s hardware, specifically the HH4000 which Bell has replaced with their Gigahub for my own hardware. Specifically the ASUS ZenWiFi XT8. And that continues to be fine for me. Though I should note that if Bell were smart, they would have a proper bridge mode for their customers to use just like Rogers does. But I might be expecting too much from Bell. Just like they should also have IPv6 on their network just like Rogers does. But I’m digressing here. I should note that the Gigahub which is going out to all new Bell customers has had some issues which Bell admits to and resolved for the most part. Though there seems to be a couple new issues that I am looking into and I will have a follow up article on that soon.

Now over to the bad. Bell has raised my bill by $5.05 a month. That’s not a deal breaker for me as I am still paying way less than I was with Rogers, and honestly I am not surprised by this. Because I did say this when I was in the process of moving to Bell and spotted a clause in their contract that gives them the right to raise your rates with 30 days notice:

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.

Well, they gave me 60 days notice before the increase. But if you’re not paying attention, you might miss it and call into Bell fuming until they point it out to you. That was me as when I got my bill, I basically said “WTF?” and called into Bell where they pointed out where to find this information. So assuming that you have a MyBell account, this is what you have to watch for:

• On the website: When you get your bill, look for a “Messages” section and if you see anything there, you should open it up and look at it. Here’s what I saw:

• On the app, Click on the words “View your detailed bill” as that will take you to Bell.ca to see the same information. Alternately you can view a PDF copy of your bill and look for something like this:

• If you get your bills by mail, you’ll see the above as well on your bill.

This is why I encourage every Bell customer to closely look at their bills to ensure that you’re never caught off guard by anything that they do. Be it something that they warn you about as is the case here, or a billing mistake or “billing mistake” that they make as Bell has a history of that behaviour. If I could give Bell some advice, this information is easy to miss and you should really send notices of rate increases by email so that that it will cut down on the number of calls that rate increases generate. But I know that they won’t do that as customer experience has never been Bell’s primary focus. Speaking of which, when I called in, I did get an agent who was pleasant and helpful. But the flip side is that I hear stories of their agents hanging up on people and being rude. So if Bell really wants to become the dominant telco in Canada, their customer experience needs to be job number 1 for them to focus on.

The only other thing that I want to note is that I cancelled Crave TV as Bell “slipped” that along with their TV service into the package claiming that it was free when it actually wasn’t. I made the changes and I will see what effect it has on my bill as I would not be surprised if my monthly fees go up. At that point I will have to call into them and cut some sort of new deal if I can. Which another reason why Bell needs to improve their customer experience as this is the sort of thing that is completely unnecessary. Making customers hop through these sorts of hoops, and having your call centre staff engage in questionable behaviour doesn’t result in happy customers. Ever.

So am I happy that I have moved to Bell? Well, I wouldn’t say that I am happy as such. Bt as long as the experience is like it has been so far, which is there are no outages or billing issues, I’m fine to continue dealing with them. But as I’ve mentioned in other posts, I have zero loyalty to any Canadian telco. If things change with Bell in a negative way, then my incentive to stick with them will decrease. Therefore, I would strongly suggest to Bell that they need to make sure that my experience so far which has been mostly positive stays that way. And if they’re smart, they will improve their customer experience, add IPv6, add a bridge mode to their hardware, or all of the above to give me more of a reason to not to ditch them. Though if I were them, I would start with their customer experience as that’s what they need to address immediately.

First of all, I’d like to thank all of you who have read my previous stories about setting up and using advanced DMZ and PPPoE bypass on Bell hardware and asked a question or made a comment. I’ve tried really hard to answer all your questions on this topic, and if you have a question that I didn’t get to answering, please email me directly and I will do my level best to answer your question.

With that in mind I do have some common questions that I’d like to answer so that it helps others. Starting with the most common question that I get, which is which is better? Advanced DMZ or PPPoE bypass. There’s no “better” option as this is somewhat use case dependent. But having said that, I do have the following thoughts:

• PPPoE Bypass is the more stable option and easier to set up. It will work without issue if you say lose power or reboot your router. But the problem, if you want to call it that, with PPPoE bypass is that most consumer hardware cannot handle the overhead that PPPoE has. Which means that particularly on the upstream side of the connection, you might not see the full speed that you are paying for. And that becomes evident when you have something above Bell’s 500 Mbps plans. Thus what I would say is that if you have a Bell Fibe connection at or below 500 Mbps, then PPPoE bypass is the best option for you. I would also say that if a “set it and forget it” type of connection matters more than raw speed, this might be an option for you regardless of what speed tier you’re on.
• In terms of advanced DMZ, this is the faster option by far as you will get very close to the speed that you are paying for. By that I mean that if you have a connection that is capable of 1.6 Gbps downstream, you’ll get very close to that. In my case, I get 1.56 Gbps. And the same is true on the upstream side of the connection. However, the way Bell has implemented this can cause issues. For example, if I do a firmware update on my router, I have to reboot my HH4000 after the router starts to reboot to get Internet access back. Or some routers require a lot of extra work to get it to work with an HH4000 or Gigahub. I’ve also noted that some routers won’t work all with this setup. Finally, I have noted that people with the Gigahub have noticed lag spikes regardless of getting the full speed that they are paying for, which affects video games and streaming negatively. But if you can get this to work, and you can live with any “weirdness” that this setup brings, this might be the better option for you.

Thus my advice is to look at your use case, and see which option would work better for you. I’d also be prepared to experiment with both setups to determine which would work better for you.

Another question that I get often is about using a UPS to provide backup power for both your Internet connection and your home phone. Specifically, how “big” of a UPS do you need? The reason why this is important is that the HH4000 and the Gigahub do not have built in batteries to power them in the event of a power outage. Bell has it’s own advice on this here, but I don’t think that their advice really works as I believe you have to have the longest runtime you possibly can to protect your ability to do things like phone for emergency services if the need arises. Plus a UPS does more than provide power in case of a blackout. It protects your hardware that’s plugged into it from surges (when the current increases suddenly) or sags (where the current drops suddenly). That protects your expensive electronic hardware from things like lightning storms and the like.

What I recommend to my clients is that they use a calculator like this one from UPS company APC to figure out what UPS they need. What you need to do is take the input voltage of each device and multiply that with the amperage to get the number of watts that each device uses. That information is usually found on a label somewhere on the device. Then you need to add the total number of watts up and enter that total into the calculator that I mentioned above. It will then give you suggestions based on the runtime that a given UPS model is capable of.

Let’s walk through this with my use case. I want to power the following devices in the even of a blackout:

• Bell HH4000
• Asus ZenWiFi XT8 (Because I want all my HomeKit devices to be able to communicate with each other)
• Apple HomePod mini (Because that would allow HomeKit to still work outside of my premises)
• A cordless phone (To make phone calls)
• Aquara M1S Hub (As that’s the alarm system that I have that is controlled by HomeKit)

So let’s use the Bell HH4000 as an example. If you look at the back of the HH4000 you will see this label:

In this case, the input voltage is 12V and the amperage is 5A. So 12V times 5A is 60 watts. I now have to repeat this exercise with the rest of the hardware that I want to keep powered. So here’s my list of items with the watts that I calculated:

• Bell HH4000 – 60W
• Asus ZenWiFi XT8 – 33.25W
• Apple HomePod mini – 50W
• A cordless phone – 2W
• Aquara M1S Hub – 7W

Total: 152.25W

One thing that I should note is all those calculations are likely peak watts. Which means that in “typical” usage, each device may be using less watts. That in turn means that you will likely get longer runtimes. But it is wise to do your calculations based on the worst case scenario.

Now taking this total and putting this into the APC calculator, it gave me a ton of options ranging from having runtimes of 12 minutes to an hour or more. In my case, I am currently using a 650VA UPS from APC which gives me about 20 minutes of runtime as that’s what I had lying around when I got Bell Fibe installed last summer. But I will likely be upgrading to this one as it will give me about an hour of runtime as that is a runtime that I am far more comfortable with. The thing that you should keep in mind that the more runtime that you want is directly related how much that you need to spend. Or if you want a longer runtime, but you don’t want to pay big bucks for that, you need to have less stuff for the UPS to power in the event of a blackout.

A final thing that I should note is that I have UPS units scattered all over my premises that power other HomeKit devices and Apple HomePod Minis. Thus most things are covered from a power perspective.

Hopefully I hope all of that helps you. If you do have any questions, please let me know either by leaving a comment below or sending me an email.

You might recall that earlier this year, veteran news anchor Lisa LaFlamme was fired by CTV. Likely due to her age and gender. And that set off a firestorm that Bell Media, owners of CTV, had problems dealing with. You can find a lot of that story here. And as part of that story, it came to light that CTV News head Michael Melling had to take a leave of absence due to the blow back from this firing. Today, it’s come to light that Melling has been “reassigned“:

Several months after Melling took a leave of absence from the news division, a Bell Media statement confirms his job will be permanently filled by Richard Gray, who has been serving as interim vice-president of news.

The company says Melling has been reassigned to vice president of shared services.

The decision follows an independent third-party review of the CTV national newsroom that was sparked after the ousting of LaFlamme as anchor of the flagship newscast.

Now let’s be clear. For someone of in Melling’s position to be “reassigned” means that he was too expensive to fire. Thus they had to find something for him to do. And this VP role is it as it puts him in a position where he in theory cannot attract any negative attention for Bell Media. Thus this doesn’t really solve the problem. And unsurprisingly, this announcement has started to trend on Twitter:

If you’re Bell media, that’s not a good look. And it doesn’t make this problem go away as Bell Media hasn’t addressed the problem.

#Fail

I’ve been tracking issues with Bell’s new Gigahub which is part of their 8 Gbps fibre rollout. Specifically there were issues with getting PPPoE pass through to work with your own router. PPPoE bypass by far the cleanest way to use your own hardware. That is assuming that your router can handle the overhead that PPPoE creates so that you get the speed that you’ve paid Bell for. It became clear that this was a Bell issue and they have been working on a updated firmware to address this. I’ve been following a thread on DSL Reports where it is becoming clear that the firmware that is working for those who have been testing it. That’s very good news.

If you are in this situation, my suggestion would be to go to the Bell Direct Forum at DSL Reports and ask a user named Bell_Dom who is a Bell employee to push the firmware to your Gigahub. Eventually I would assume that this will be pushed to all Gigahubs so everyone can benefit from this new firmware.

UPDATE: Bell appears to be rolling out firmware to Gigahub users. Details here.

It’s Q3 results season for Canada’s “big three” telcos and I’ve been waiting for this for a while as I want to see what effect that the great Rogers outage back in July had on the “big three”. Bell was the first to come to the table with their results and you can see that they had one hell of a Q3. Here’s a quote attributed to Mirko Bibic, President and CEO of BCE and Bell Canada from the press release:

“We’re seeing clear demand from Canadians for differentiated fibre Internet services and fast, reliable wireless networks. We experienced over 400,000 net activations across our wireline and wireless networks, with our highest-ever number of total mobile phone net additions, and we also gained a significant share of Internet subscriber growth with over 95,000 new net fibre-to-the-home customers this past quarter, up 33% over last year and our best-ever result.

While I am sure that Bell won’t say that Rogers was the reason behind this growth, it was likely a factor. Along with the fact that they are rolling out fibre as fast as they possibly can. Which then leads to customers signing up with Bell as they have a much better Internet offering. And the Rogers outage and customers not being happy about that also likely drove people to Bell. Leaving the boys in red in no position to compete against Bell. I want to see what numbers Telus puts up because if they have similar growth, it will be clear that Rogers is in deep trouble. Thus stay tuned as this will get interesting to watch.

You might recall that I wrote about the new Bell Gigahub which is part of their 8 Gbps fibre rollout, and the troubles that some people have had with it when it comes to using their own gear with the Gigahub. And I asked for people who were in the Greater Toronto Area who were having trouble with to ping me so that I could see these issues first hand. First of all, I’d like to thank the people who’ve I met over the last couple of weeks to look at this, and it’s allowed me to conclude that this Gigahub has issues. And what’s really good about this situation is that Bell has confirmed that there are issues with the Gigahub via this thread on DSLReports.com and that a firmware fix is coming (click to enlarge):

Bell_Dom is a Bell employee who really goes above and beyond to help Bell customers on DSLReports.com. Thus if he says it, it’s fact. Though I would love to know when this firmware is rolling out so that I can be ready to assist the people that I’ve met further.

In any case, here’s what the issue is:

• If you have a Bell service that uses XGS-PON, then the Gigahub will work fine. Bell’s 8 Gbps service uses XGS-PON.
• If you have a Bell service that uses GPON, then the Gigshub doesn’t work with your own hardware properly. Every other Bell service uses GPON.

Thus I have to assume that that Bell or Sagecomm who makes the Gigahub screwed something up with their GPON support when it is used with a third party router. I’m kind of not surprised by this as people using their own gear are an edge case to Bell. Thus I can see that they would not spend any time testing that scenario.

I’ll be keeping an eye on this and I will provide updates as I become aware of them.

UPDATE: I was asked in the comments below if one should change their Gigahub to XGS-PON to GPON to fix this issue. The answer is NO. Absolutely NOT. This is a setting for the Bell hardware that Bell’s hardware has to communicate to the Bell network depending on the use case. By that I mean that depending on what Bell speed tier you have, this setting might change. Changing this will break access to the Internet. So you should not touch this. Again, Bell will address this issue in a firmware update.

UPDATE #2: Bell has updated firmware that seems to address this issue. Details here.

One of the things that came with my recent Bell Install is was the Home Hub 4000 (AKA: HH4000) hardware, which I have effectively bypassed by using first this method and then this method to do it. But since Bell has been rolling out a new piece of hardware as they roll out 8Gbps service in an attempt to make their chief rival Rogers as extinct as a T-Rex. That piece of hardware is called the Gigahub. On the surface it looks like an HH4000, but it’s not. The main difference is that it comes with WiFi 6E rather than WiFi 6. Which if you have hardware that supports WiFi 6E you can get faster WiFi speeds as you will be on a less congested frequency. But under the hood, it runs different firmware which implies that there are other differences that users are not aware of. And perhaps some of those differences are starting to appear in the form of problems that users of this new modem are having.

For example, there is a thread on DSL Reports where people are having issues with PPPoE pass through which is by far the cleanest way to use your own hardware. That is assuming that your router can handle the overhead that PPPoE creates so that you get the speed that you’ve paid Bell for. Reading through the thread, it seems that users are not only having a variety of issues, but some of this appears to have been escalated to Sagecomm who makes the hardware for Bell. Thus if you want to go the route of using your own gear via PPPoE pass through, you may want to be aware that at present, this may not work for you.

The second thing that I have noted is some anecdotal evidence that using the DMZ method may not work nearly was well as it did with the HH4000. I use the word “anecdotal” because I have not directly touched this hardware and tried to troubleshoot this myself. Nor is there anything that I can find online that validates what I am hearing. But a couple of people have reached out to me for help as the documentation that I have created to assist people in setting this up doesn’t seem to work anymore. At least not without some extra tinkering.

Thus I am asking for a favour. If you are in the Greater Toronto Area, and you get this Gigahub from Bell and you wish to set it up to use your own gear, I am willing to assist with that for free (as I normally charge for my services) so that I can better understand what the issues with the Gigahub are so that I can better communicate to the readers of this blog how to set this hardware up so that it can be used with your own hardware. Thus if that’s you, please reach out to me by email and we’ll take it from there.

In the meantime, if you get new service from Bell, or you upgrade to faster service, you should try ask for or keep the HH4000 as that is clearly a stable platform that works. At least until whatever issues with the Gigahub are sorted.

UPDATE: I have additional information here.

Bell today announced its wireless network has been awarded fastest in Canada for the third year in a row in PCMag’s 2022 Fastest Mobile Networks Canada report, the annual study of mobile network performance across the country. The report also ranks Bell’s 5G network as fastest in the country, scoring fastest in 22 of the 31 cities and rural areas tested.

In its 10th annual Fastest Mobile Networks Canada test, PCMag’s wireless technology experts drove across Canada, covering 31 cities and rural areas to test the network speed and coverage of Canada’s major wireless brands. PCMag’s exhaustive analysis took place in August and September and ranked providers based on a weighted average of download speeds, upload speeds and latency.

Expanding 5G+ and 5G networks 
Earlier this summer, Bell announced the availability of 5G+ service in southern Ontario. Today, Bell is expanding its service to more communities across the province. Available today in Hamilton, Markham, Middlesex Centre, North Dumfries, Puslinch and Thames Centre, Bell 5G+ is expected to be faster and more responsive, allowing for a superior mobile experience. Bell will continue to expand 5G+ across the country and is on track to offer coverage to approximately 40% of the Canadian population by the end of 2022.

Bell also continues to expand its 5G service, with availability in all 10 Canadian provinces. Today, Bell is expanding to 84 more communities in Alberta, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Prince Edward Island and Québec.

For more details about 5G+ and 5G, including coverage, pricing, availability and compatible devices, please visit Bell.ca/network.