The IT Nerd

Those who have followed my journey with Bell Fibe will know that there are two ways to use your own router with Bell’s hardware, in my case an Home Hub 4000. There’s the PPPoE method and the Advanced DMZ method. The latter has worked for me more or less flawlessly for months. And that was despite an ASUS XT8 firmware update that caused some issues with Advanced DMZ for a bit. But that changed last week when Bell dropped this firmware update that seems to have made the Advanced DMZ functionality unusable:

This firmware appeared on my HH4000 sometime last week, and yesterday Bell forced a reboot on my HH4000 which took down my network. Despite my best efforts, I could not get Advanced DMZ to work. Thus I had to resort to going to a double NAT setup which is not ideal. But it works for me so far.

My theory is that a combination of the most recent ASUS firmware that I have on my XT8 router and this new Bell firmware is responsible for Advanced DMZ not working properly. There’s no way for me to test this from the Bell side of the fence as there’s no way to roll back firmware updates with Bell hardware. What I may do is roll back the firmware on the XT8 and test again. But that isn’t a today problem for me as I have other priorities at the moment, and things are working at the moment. When I do get around to doing this, I will post an update. But if you suddenly have issues with your Bell setup, you now know where to look in terms of where to start your troubleshooting.

With prices increasing on almost everything, we’re all looking for ways to save, especially this back to school season. Bell is here to help – Bell has introduced exclusive offers for post secondary students on Fibe Internet and mobile phone plans with a dedicated student page to make it easy and convenient. Not only that, Bell’s offering savings to everyone this back to school season.

It appears that Bell has an issue that is impacting their cellular customers at the moment. Here’s a look at what DownDetector sees:

Whatever issues Bell is having, it started earlier this morning and got worse just before 1PM. At least Bell has admitted to issues in the Toronto area on Twitter:

But to be honest, I am not sure if these issues extend beyond Toronto. But the bottom line is that if you’re having issues making a phone call on your Bell cell phone, it’s them and not you.

UPDATE: Bell is now saying that the issue is resolved:

If you’re seeing something different, please let me know.

Bell announced its pure fibre Internet has been awarded fastest in Canada in Ookla’s Q1-Q2 Speedtest Awards report, the biannual analysis of wireline and wireless performance across the country. The report also ranks Bell pure fibre Wi-Fi as fastest in the country. With the addition of previous recognition won by Bell such as PCMag Best Major ISP for Gaming and BrandSpark’s Most Trusted ISP, Bell becomes Canada’s most awarded Internet service provider.

Based on Speedtest results independently collected and analyzed by Ookla, the Q1-Q2 Speedtest Awards recognizes the best speed and coverage of Canada’s major providers.

Many households today have multiple devices connected simultaneously throughout the home, with phones, laptops, smart TVs, security cameras, thermostats and smart appliances all connecting to Wi-Fi. Bell is enhancing the at-home experience, offering increasingly faster speeds to customers with products such as Giga Hub with Wi-Fi 6E compatibility and gigabit plus speeds, Wi-Fi pods to extend the connectivity in specific areas of the home and more. Bell customers can easily access the fastest Internet across the country allowing them to work, learn, video chat, stream and game online on any or all of their household devices simultaneously.

Quick facts:

• Bell pure fibre won Canada’s fastest Internet in the Ookla Q1-Q2 2023 Speedtest Awards
• Bell pure fibre ranked as Canada’s fastest Wi-Fi verified by Ookla for Q1-Q2 2023
• Bell is Canada’s most awarded Internet service provider

This weekend we’ll come together to celebrate this great nation and the many cultural communities that have made it so strong and vibrant. At Bell, they’ve been connecting Canadians and those that call Canada home for over 140 years. From coast to coast, to across the world, they make it easy for everyone to connect, especially newcomers and visitors to Canada. Recognizing how important it is to stay connected with family and friends, and the new opportunities being connected can bring, is their focus.

With that in mind, in the lead up to Canada Day, Bell announced a new partnership with the Institute for Canadian Citizenship (ICC) and its flagship app, Canoo, to bring unique offers to newcomers. Canoo is Canada’s largest national welcome network with nearly 200,000 members. Canoo gives newcomers free VIP access to more than 1,400 of Canada’s best cultural and outdoor experiences, along with exclusive deals from top brands.

To kick off this new partnership, Bell will soon be introducing exclusive mobility and Internet offers for Canoo members:

• Starting in Ontario, Québec, Atlantic Canada and Manitoba, new Bell home Internet subscribers can get a $100Visa Prepaid Card with activation of an eligible home Internet plan.
• New eligible Bell mobility subscribers can get a credit of between $20-30 per month during their first 2 years, plus 1,000 free long distance minutes per month for the first 24 months with a mobility purchase on either an Ultimate or Essential Plan. This offer is valid for in-store redemption and with bring-your-own-device (BYOD) plans only.

Bell is excited to be Canoo’s exclusive telecommunications partner – supporting this great initiative, to help unlock Canada for newcomers and assisting them in their journey to a full and active citizenship.

In addition to their partnership with ICC, here are a few other ways Bell is supporting newcomers and multicultural communities:

• Bell now accepts International IDs as a valid document when signing up for wireless and wireline plans, allowing newcomers to connect to Canada’s best network on day one
• With our new partnership with Air Canada, newcomers and visitors on select international flights to Canada can now activate complimentary SIM cards in flight, allowing them to walk off the plane and be connected
• Bell.ca now supports pages translated in Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese
• Their call centres now support Mandarin and Cantonese
• Bell is a proud sponsor of several upcoming multicultural events, including BollywoodMonster Mashup, Mosaic Fest, Taste of India, Mosaic Fest, Surrey Fusion Festival, and earlier this month, the Toronto International Dragon Boat Festival
• Bell’s official WeChat account is now available in Simplified Chinese (see the QR code below)

Just before 11AM EST, Bell Canada had some sort of Internet outage that stopped their modems from connecting to their service. The error message that people were seeing was “Error 2100” which meant that the modem could not authenticate to the Bell network. Down Detector captured the fact that this was a widespread issue:

Fortunately the issue was addressed by Bell just before 11:20 AM EST where service was restored. But looking at Bell’s Twitter accounts, there was no acknowledgement by the telco that there was any issue. And looking at the screenshot above, this was the second outage in 12 hours. Clearly something is up with Bell at the moment and it would be in their interest to explain what is going on and what they are doing to make whatever is going on go away.

Today, in partnership with Toronto Ultra, Canada’s professional Call of Duty esport team, Bell announced they’ve insured the fingers of each Toronto Ultra team player for up to $1 million which is a first for them, and for a professional esports team in Canada.

From texting, to typing and gaming, fingers are essential to the sport, and now the team is fully covered when they compete at the end of the month at the Bell sponsored Call of Duty League Major V Tournament (May 25-28 in Toronto). It’s here team members, including Jamie “Insight” Craven, Tobias “CleanX” Jønsson, Thomas “Scrap” Ernst, and Charlie “Hicksy” Hicks will debut their newly insured fingers. Toronto Ultra is one of the standout teams to watch, having won the Major III Championship earlier this year. Sold out crowds are expected with limited single-day tickets still available at Ticketmaster.ca.

Many of the world’s top athletes have insured their most prized body parts, including star baseball pitchers insuring their arms and soccer players insuring their legs. By insuring esports players’ fingers up to $1 million each, Bell is reinforcing the legitimacy of esports as a professional sport and demonstrating the potential for growth and investment in the industry.

As a key strategic investor in OverActive Media, and founding partner of Toronto Ultra, Bell is committed to innovation by pushing the boundaries of sports sponsorship campaigns, and as Canada’s best gaming Internet provider for the second straight year as per PCMag Best Gaming ISPs 2023 report (PCMag.com), they’re proud to  continue to deliver a premium gaming experience with high speed and low latency for Toronto Ultra athletes and fans through their fibre Internet technology.

Check out Bell’s YouTube page for more on this exciting sponsorship campaign. To learn more about Bell’s fibre Internet technology, please visit Bell.ca/Bell_Internet.

Something that has been a constant with my stories about Bell Canada has been the fact that they have a great product in terms of their fibre Internet offerings, but their customer service sucks. In fact, I have previously said this:

If I were Mirko Bibic the CEO of Bell, I’d be doing everything possible to improve the customer experience as my experience with their call centre reps was not that good. And improving the customer experience should include ending their practice of outsourcing and offshoring their customer service staff. I say that because Rogers doesn’t have outsourced and offshore staff, and their customer experience is far better than Bell’s. And that was enough for my wife and I to hang in with them despite the fact that their Internet offering was substandard in comparison to what Bell offers. That is until their outage issues forced us to Bell. But to be clear, if Rogers somehow is able to get their act together and comes up with an Internet offering that is actually competitive with Bell and actually reliable, and Rogers customer service continues to better than Bell, then they may have the means to lure us back. Because having great customer service is what matters. And right now, Bell doesn’t have that. At least not at the call centre level.

Yesterday was a great example of that. My wife complained to me that the Internet was slow. So like any good husband, I investigated this expecting to find that the Internet was fine and something was wrong with her iPhone which was the device that she was using. Expect the Internet was not fine based on this:

Something was seriously wrong with my download speed as it was abysmal. It wasn’t even 10% of the speed that I normally get as evidenced by the speed test from last October. The upload speed was more or less fine. So after rebooting my HH4000 a couple of times and not getting any change in speed, I called Bell. After punching my way through their phone system, I got an actual human who after I explained my issue to them, audibly signed and then promptly hung up on me.

Now this surprised me, but didn’t surprise me at the same time. It did surprise me as I expect that in 2023 that all calls in any call centre are recorded and a percentage of them are reviewed. And I would assume that when this call was reviewed, he should be as good as fired. But the fact that he hung up on me suggests that this specific agent either didn’t know that, or didn’t care because he was playing the odds that this call would not be reviewed. As for it didn’t surprise me part, I have heard stories like this before in places like Reddit as well as from some of my clients. Which is Bell call centre reps have a tendency to hang up on people. Either way, it tells you all you need about how seriously the employees of whatever call centre Bell contracts take their jobs. I’ll come back to that later.

Now I called back and once again punching my way through their phone system, I got a woman who after I explained my issue to them, and the fact that I was hung up on, took a very professional attitude in terms of trying to address this issue. She also apologized for the previous agent hanging up on me. After running some tests and confirming that my Internet speed was abysmally slow, she made some changes on her end which caused my HH4000 to reboot. What she likely did was push a new speed profile to the HH4000 so that it knew how fast it was supposed to be going. That implied that the profile that was on the modem was incorrect or messed up. After the modem came back up, she ran a few more tests along with yours truly and the problem was fixed.

Total time invested: 3 Minutes for the call where the agent hung up on me, and 16 minutes for the call where the issue was actually fixed.

Now this issue highlights the fact that Bell’s customer service can be great, or it can be crap. It’s simply luck of the draw based on the agent that you get. I’ve had good experiences with Bell’s customer service as evidenced here. But this was certainly a bad experience that worked itself out at the end of the day. And that’s Bell Canada’s major problem. Since Bell clearly does not have any control of whomever they outsource their customer service to, customers of Bell get a very uneven experience. And that experience can trend toward bad if you call them often enough. This needs to change because the only thing stopping Bell from completely destroying Rogers is the quality of their customer service. It needs to be consistently good so that customers know that when they call Bell, they will get the help that they need. And by consistently, I mean 100% of the time. That’s not happening right now. And even with Rogers bringing back jobs to Canada that Shaw outsourced to other countries, that’s not enough pressure for Bell to do the same thing. The fact that Rogers has done this means that Rogers has an advantage over Bell which is that they completely control the customer experience. As I said earlier, the fact that Rogers had great customer service was enough to keep us with them until their products became unreliable. Bell really needs to rethink how they deliver customer service because that’s the only thing that’s keeping them from wiping the floor with Rogers. And they need to get moving on that now.

Frequent readers of the blog will know that while I like Bell for the quality of their Internet offering, I don’t like the quality of their customer service. Specifically, I’ve said this in the past:

Bell’s customer service reps are insanely aggressive and walk up to the line of what I believe to be ethical behaviour in order to get you to subscribe to more services with Bell. This behaviour by these customer service reps, whom I am pretty sure are working for outsourced overseas call centres, is sure to turn some people off. For example, when my wife and I tried to switch to Bell a year ago, their behaviour was so bad that it sent us running back to Rogers. Though that was only for one more year and ended when Rogers recent troubles started. And when we did switch a couple of weeks ago, we were forced to run the gauntlet of Bell’s customer service reps upselling us to death. None of this helps Bell’s public image in any way as a lot of people have said to me that Bell’s tech is great, but Bell’s customer service sucks. If I were Mirko Bibic the CEO of Bell, I’d be figuring out how to fix that as their Internet offering is enough to win customers over by itself without having to resort to the borderline used car salesman tactics that are used by their customer service reps. 

Yesterday, I had an interaction with Bell’s customer service team that was the exact opposite. I had a client who bought a new MacBook Pro who was trying to add their email account to it. But it wouldn’t work and they couldn’t figure out why. On top of that, the same account on other devices suddenly stopped working. Which is why I got a phone call. It didn’t take me long to figure out what the issue was, which was they were using the wrong password. That in turn locked the email account which is a feature that Bell has with its email service.

That led me to what I needed to do to fix this. Well, normally I would ask the customer to log into their MyBell account to reset the password. But they didn’t know what the username and password for that was. So that left myself and my client to call Bell which is something that we were both dreading as we both haven’t had the best interactions with Bell in the past.

So after dialling them up and getting to the right department, we had a customer service rep pick up the phone quickly who then verified who my client was and permitted the client to let me drive the call. I then explained what I needed and the rep issued a temporary password, which I then used to get into the email account via Bell’s webmail service and change it to something that the customer could remember. From there I was able to get into her email on her MacBook and I was able to not only find her username for MyBell, but I was able to use the password reset function to allow her to get into it.

Total time invested: 8 Minutes.

At no time did the customer service rep try to sell us anything. Nor did they try to hurry us off the phone. Instead they were polite, patient, and supportive. While this is a sample size of one, I am hoping that this is indicative of Bell finally realizing that they needed to course correct when it comes to their customer service. If that is the case, I applaud Bell because their quality of customer service is what is holding them back from taking Rogers breakfast, lunch, and dinner. But I will be watching closely to see if this is just a fluke, or a sign of things to come.

I’ve been saying for a long time that Bell has a real advantage over cable companies like Rogers by getting fibre in as many places as possible and by having speeds that destroys anything that cable can offer. And Bell is going to highlight that this Sunday during the Super Bowl with a new national English TV ad that highlights Bell’s pure fibre Internet.

The main message of the ad is that Bell fibre based gigabit speeds beat cable every time, and now’s the time to switch to Bell pure fibre Internet as anything else is terrifying. The ad follows a family as they enter their new vacation rental home, only to find out they need to escape the horror of cable Internet 

Following the premiere on Sunday, which will air on CTV and TSN here in Canada, along with the entire game, Canadians can catch the ad on TV and in select Cineplex VIP Cinemas in Toronto and Montreal starting next week.

Now you don’t have to wait for Super Bowl Sunday to see the ad. I’ve got it for you to take a look right now:

My $0.02 worth. The ad is very funny and it drives the point that Bell is better than cable home. They don’t mention Rogers by name, but the cable box with the red light is a big hint Rogers is the target of this ad. If I were Rogers, Cogeco, or Shaw, I would have no idea how any of them respond to this ad because of the fact that what any of those companies offer in terms of Internet access doesn’t measure up to what Bell offers.