On Tue, Apr 28, 2026 at 11:06 AM D. Hugh Redelmeier via Talk < talk@lists.gtalug.org> wrote: If you have Bell fibre, your DSL days are over or soon will be.
I consider myself fortunate. I still have CTTH (copper to the house) alongside the recently-installed fibre, because I refuse to get rid of the POTS service that I've had since moving into my house in the mid-2000s. (Heh. For *that* I maintain a relationship with Teksavvy.) I've been told repeatedly that if I cancel the POTS service I will never get it back. I heed that advice. I have had phone service during power outages and never had problems with faxing (which I'm told can have issues with VOIP). I get an amazing amount of Chinese phone spam on the POTS line which is easily ignored. The mobile phone monopoly has fewer walls: hardly any added value (coverage
and roaming still matters a bit).
It has mattered to me quite a bit. Being able to call to the US and roam in the US using my existing plan's allocations have been very helpful. The Freedom "Roam Beyond <https://www.freedommobile.ca/en-CA/network-coverage/international-roaming>" plan became invaluable during a recent multi-country cruise. Hardly any vertical component, as much as they try.
Because they own sources of content, Rogers and Bell have the ability to bundle such content with plans that resellers can't match. This is the part I find most anticompetitive. The community feeling is that Bell tries to make servicing worse for third party
customers. I cannot verify this. Support is a bucket brigade: only the ISP can talk with Bell.
I can confirm this to be accurate in my instance. My problem with Teksavvy is that they exploit this situation to deflect attention from their own defects. On three separate occasions they have blamed Bell and Rogers for problems that were really caused by their shitty choices in modems. In one case, after Teksavvy denied blame and forced a Bell service call to my house (and all the cat-and-mouse involved in scheduling THAT), the Bell tech tested my line (just fine) but looked at the DSL modem they'd given me and laughed out loud. That model was evaluated by Bell and rejected immediately, he said, yet Teksavvy decided it was good enough. Not one of the devices Teksavvy supplied me, either for cable or DSL, gave steady service for more than a year. Also, f*ck Sagemcom. Compounding the problem with shitty equipment are the policies on exchanging it. Teksavvy has no brick-and-mortar presence outside Chatham so no way to just go to a GTA location and swap the device. If your equipment goes wonky any time after Friday noon (or even sooner if it takes time to diagnose the problem), you're down till Tuesday at the earliest. They can't be bothered to partner with a GTA location to provide a swap depot. After the third time this happened to me I'd had enough. - Evan