OT: Bell Internet Performance Service - Up to 7 Mbps

Alex Beamish talexb-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
Sun Nov 2 21:27:34 UTC 2008


On Sat, Nov 1, 2008 at 4:28 PM, Meng Cheah <meng-D1t3LT1mScs at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Hi
>
> Is anyone using the above and would like to share their experience, both
> good and bad?

I have both good and bad stories to tell.

I've had Sympatico service since it was available (since 2000?) , and
I'm now on my third DSL modem. Service has been OK -- although I don't
use BitTorrent, so I have no way of knowing if my traffic is being
shaped.

First the good news: I was getting 3MB/sec about six months ago, not
bad, but like anything else, you always want more, so when someone
from Sympatico called and offered me 5MB/sec for $40/month, down from
my original plan of $45/month, I said I was interested. Yes, there was
a 30G/month cap, but first I asked if there was some for me to find
out how much bandwidth I was using (yes, that's possible from the web
site) and how much overage would cost me ($1.50 per additional G).
With that in mind, I decided I could live with the new service, and I
told him to sign me up. He said the faster speed should kick in within
a week.

An aside: my situation is a little unusual -- I have two phone lines
at my house, one for my business (on hiatus right now), and one for
the family. I have Internet service on the business line. Can you see
trouble brewing?

Anyway, two weeks went buy and there was no speed improvement, so when
Sympatico called out of the blue to ask how things were, I posed the
question, why isn't my bandwidth better? Oh, the tech said, you have
5MB/sec service on your number. No I don't, I said, I have 3MB/sec,
and checked it while I talked with him. Then the awful truth revealed
itself -- the geniuses (and I use this term loosely) at Sympatico had
*added* a *new* DSL connection to my home line, rather than
*upgrading* the *existing* service on my business line. Sigh.

I was very unhappy, and although it took a while for him to understand
me, the tech did eventually get that he was to cancel the DSL on the
home number and *upgrade* the business line DSL. And he refunded the
month's service I'd been billed.

And, yes, the business line's DSL now works at 5MB/sec -- the upload
speed used to be 80K/sec; I think it is a little better now -- perhaps
120K/sec -- but I'm not exactly sure.

On a related note, my previous modem/router combination started to die
about six months back, and after getting nowhere with Sympatico tech
support, I went out and bought myself a nice Sympatico approved modem
(2701HG-G -- complete with Sympatico logo -- it's legit) from Future
Shop. Of course, when Sympatico incorrectly added the new DSL service
to my home number, they shipped me a new modem -- exactly the same one
I was already using. I had been ready to install this, imagining that
I needed a newer modem to get the higher speed, but when I discovered
it was exactly the same model as the modem that I already had, I
decided not to bother.

So I contacted Sympatico, and asked them to send me a label so I could
send this unneeded modem back, along with the old one that died. That
extremely complicated process took me 35 minutes over an Internet
chat. Thirty. Five. Minutes.

> What is the performance with Bittorrent?

Because of the asymmetrical Internet connection that DSL provides,
I've always figured running BitTorrent wouldn't be very productive --
I'd probably want to throttle it down so it didn't use all of my
up-channel, and I always imagined having a ratio of 5M down to (say)
50K up (a ratio of 100 to 1) wouldn't really be very useful. But I'd
be interested to hear other points of view.

-- 
Alex Beamish
Toronto, Ontario
aka talexb
--
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