Results tagged “bell”

When it comes to holding customers in seething contempt, few corporate entities do it with more blatancy than the Canadian telcos. And they know customers hate them—that's why Koodo (a brand owned by Telus, though you'd never know it) mocks the industry's despicable practices in their advertising. But when three biggies control an entire market, forcing users into long-term contracts and deliberately muddying their fee structures, the notion of customer service is merely an insignificant byproduct of offering a service to customers.

For more than a year now, Canadian ISPs, net neutrality advocacy groups, and the CRTC have been battling over the issue of internet traffic management. ISPs, like Bell Canada and Rogers, argue that they need to manage their network traffic in order to stop BitTorrent users from hogging all the bandwidth; net neutrality advocacy groups, on the other side of the issue, believe that the ISPs should treat all internet traffic equally, with the limited exceptions of viruses and spam. Groups like SaveOurNet.ca also argue that Canadian ISPs are inflating the issue in order to gain the leverage necessary to create a lucrative tiered internet service, so that they can charge Canadians more for their access. Finally, somewhere in the middle, the CRTC has been listening to both sides of the argument.

Listening to the debate between the CRTC and Canada’s major internet service providers (news here, here, and here) during recent public hearings is a bit like overhearing a pair of Luddites discuss how the tiny people in computers make the World Wide Web work. ISPs such as Rogers and Bell continue to argue they provide nothing more than a “dumb pipe” through which web content imperceptibly flows (even though they’ve been “smart” enough to throttle BitTorrent downloads on smaller ISPs such as TekSavvy) and shouldn't therefore be expected to provide funds for the promotion of Canadian culture online.

If you want to gauge the disconnect between business "experts” and regular, everyday consumers, read online coverage of Bell Canada’s announced purchase of 750 The Source (formerly Radio Shack) stores last Monday. This apparently “gutsy” move will get noticed, said Kaan Yigit, president of telecommunications consultancy Solutions Research Group in the Globe and Mail, because "The Source is a respected leader in consumer electronics retailing right across Canada,” explained Bell and BCE CEO George Cope in the Star.

While Second Cup and Starbucks have offered Wi-Fi service for years, the cost model has always leaned towards laptop users: customers can choose to purchase internet for an hour, a day, or a month. However, the explosion of Wi-Fi enabled smartphones changes the use of Wi-Fi: checking an email, using GPS, or finding a telephone listing takes minutes. Here's a catch: in the States, the internet period is limited to a single session. Once you log off, you're done for the day. We wonder if Bell will make the session cumulative or if the telco will follow suit. (Doesn't it appears that telcos plan to take advantage of the changing market to manipulate Wi-Fi at the major coffee chains to become marketing tools for products like the iPhone or WiMax?)

So we're, uh, pretty sure that Bell's behind those mystery "er" ads after all.

The latest ubiquitous mystery ad is "er." Though it has various configurations—billboards, (illegal) signs, and subway station placards—it always takes the same rough form: two blue letters in the same typeface, and some lone blue shape on the edge of an otherwise white canvas. It's no Obay as far as provocativeness goes, but it's nonetheless drumming up more than its fair share of interest.

In two months, the Do Not Call List will launch across Canada to help prevent telemarketers from spamming your phones. Signing up is simple—you can do it online or by phone—and companies that don't abide will face a serious fine. The service will be operated by Bell Canada, which won a five-year contract earlier this year.

Federal Industry Minister Jim Prentice has demanded a meeting with the honchos from Bell and Telus so they can explain to him exactly why they decided to charge their pay-per-use users 15¢ per received text message, calling the decision "ill thought-out." Canadian technology users are consequently planning to demand a meeting with Minister Prentice to ask him to explain ACTA and Bill C-61, calling them "ill thought-out."

A day after Google called out Bell for throttling BitTorrent traffic, and a few days before Rogers releases the iPhone in Canada to significant customer dissatisfaction (the latest news is that Apple won't even be selling iPhones from their own retail stores because of Apple's dissatisfaction with Rogers' pricing plans), Bell and Telus have decided to up the ante, lower the telecom bar, and infuriate their customers even more.

To the casual net surfer it might seem that Bell’s newly launched online video store is just another way the telecommunications giant is competing with rampant P2P file-sharers.

Like it or not, big bad Rogers will be the exclusive provider of Apple's beautiful and magnificent and world-changing iPhone, and as each week goes by it's getting harder and harder to mitigate disgust for the former with adoration for the latter.

Latest transit update from the Torontoist Action News Team Live Info Centre, Your Only Source For All TTC Strike News: if you're a regular TTC rider, GO Transit doesn't want you. A spokesperson for GO has advised that that they're already operating at capacity with their regular passenger load, and don't plan to run any additional buses or trains in the event of a TTC strike.

The day after the CBC announced its plans to release the finale of Canada's Next Great Prime Minister through BitTorrent, Bell Canada has moved quietly to throttle its services—including peer-to-peer filesharing—outraging both its customers and wholesale clients.

We wouldn't suggest for a second that the competition between Bell and Rogers has gotten so fierce that Rogers has resorted to cutting its rival's cables to pick up new subscribers. We're sure it was just an accident. An accident that happened often enough to prompt someone to tape this note to a utility box in front of an East York house.

Barack Obama thumps Hillary Clinton in last night's primaries. Obama for the first time won the majority of Latino voters, the majority of women voters, and the majority of senior citizen voters, while broadening his support in the demographics he was already winning. On the bright side for Hillary, she did manage to win the vote of nearly 87 percent of the voters who thought she was more qualified to be President than Obama. On the Republican side, John McCain won all his primaries, then told us that Barack Obama is a young whippersnapper selling false hope, and that grownups know that despair is the only rational response to the world.

Equal Voice, a group which advocates for more women in government, reports that there are 22% more women running in this year's provincial election than in 2003. However, they also note that because many women are competing in ridings where they have no hope of winning, the numbers may not translate into more female legislators. You know, rather than spending time and money trying to elect more women, the whole inequity thing could be solved through a program of gender reassignment surgery on sitting MPPs.

City council says up to 2,500 tonnes of dog poop are deposited in park trash bins every year. This is problematic since our garbage dumps in Michigan refuse to take it. So where should we put our growing heap of canine feces? Councillor Pam McConnell (Ward 28, Toronto Centre-Rosedale) thinks the city should provide green bins in parks, while Councillor Paula Fletcher (Ward 30, Toronto-Danforth) doesn't think it's a big deal for dog owners to carry the waste home and flush/compost it. What are your thoughts on this crap?

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If the most inspired feminist action we take in Canada is to challenge those silly Bell Canada ad campaigns, perhaps author Judy Rebick is right to call for more activism. Or, conversely, if the Bell ads are in fact our call to action, maybe next we could target Nickelback for being latent sex offenders? (Was it just us, or was that "Figured You Out" song about some sort of Chad Kroeger sexual assault? Gross nonetheless).