I bought a DSL modem/router because I signed up for DSL with TekSavvy on their $30/mth 5Mb no cap service. I have heard good things about them, and they’re cheaper than Bell without a contract (ask me for a referral, I get a $1/mth discount per person). Although, they’re not the cheapest provider which would be Acanac with their $19/mth taxes in offer, but that requires a one-year contract. I signed up on August 2^nd, the day before I left for the long weekend, so that things would be setup by the time I got back (well they quoted the Wednesday, 8/8). I finally got everything hooked up and working on Friday, the 17^th!

I can’t say it was the fault of TekSavvy, although I now have their tech support number memorized. After the 8^th came and passed, I called them up to see what was happening and they opened a ticket with Bell to have it looked at. I called 24h later, as they suggested, to get an update; but they said the work had been done yet my internet still did not work. So another ticket was opened, and this time Bell actually called to see if we needed to have any work done. Of course, my dad said no and the ticket was again closed. So I called back and asked them to re-open the ticket which they did eventually. At this point, I was wondering that maybe the line was OK, since my building was relatively new. So I went over to Victor’s place to check out my modem and indeed it was a dud. I went to Canada Computers the next day and replaced it, and yep my Internet still did not work.

So back to dealing with Bell. I actually spoke with a field tech on the phone about the latest ticket, but because I had a problem with DSL and not vDSL (which is used in my building), and I’m not getting my internet through Bell, then he wasn’t supposed to look at it. I tried explaining to him that my ISP subcontracts to Bell look after the lines, but he said he had to check with his boss, who of course “said” no. I called TekSavvy back and explained the situation to them again, and the opened yet another ticket. This time, a different field tech showed up and came up to see what the situation was. He was a bit flaky, and seemed to have training on what to do rather than knowing what to do, but was kind of a nice guy. After hearing that I was getting internet through a 3rd party provider, but over Bell hardware; he called a couple of his friends and chatted with them (both about business and not) to get some idea on how to proceed. He said that he heard of situations like this, but I guess there was no official memo from Bell telling their field techs that something like this would actually occur.

Anyways, in the end, he sorted things out and I finally have internet. The problem was that I get TV, phone, and internet (if I subscribed to Sympatico) through one phone line using vDSL. I couldn’t add normal DSL on top of vDSL since 1) the DSL has to go to a separate non-vDSL DSLAM, and 2) I can’t overlap another signal on the high frequencies. So the tech set up a dry pair to run the TV signal and put my phone and (normal) DSL on the other pair. It seems like everything’s sorted out, but let’s see whether the next Bell phone bill is messed up or not.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: corporations, dumb, geeky