The phone company wants to commit highway robbery!

[KMG365]

For the past two days, our home phone has not been working. The first problem I noticed with our service was that all outgoing calls would result in a busy signal. It seems that incoming calls were not affected. Yesterday, we had a power outage and the phone stopped working altogether.

A Bell technician came by today, connected his portable phone to the demarcation box on the house (this is the area where the phone line enters the house and Bell stops taking responsibility for problems) and concluded that some of the wires in the box were faulty. These faulty wires, he said, were causing our service problems and, if we wanted him to fix it, he'd have to charge us $100. The house isn't even two years old yet and we've never had a problem before, but Bell insists that we should be on the hook to fix the faulty lines. It seems they only give a 30 day warranty on wiring and, of course, that ran out long ago.

I'm not sure who runs the phone cable in a new house - is it Bell or the electrical contractor or somebody else? In any case, I don't know why we should be forced to pay $100 for a problem that was obviously caused by someone else. :evil:

 

[MumsyRat]

Bell charges very high fees for a service call but you have no obligation to use them if they consider the equipment not theirs. There's all kinds of private phone repair guys who will fix it for a lot less! Get out your yellow pages and get some pricing. Either that or call Bell and tell them if they don't want to fix it you're moving your business elsewhere. They might just cough up a free service call.

Bell sucks even worse than Rogers!

 

[dreamwarrior]

if you threaten to cancel ou will go to retention why will do anything to keep you as a customer. if your bitchy they will help you more.

 

[KMG365]

Thanks for the advice! The problem is we currently live in a small town and I think Bell is probably the only game in town. We'll definitely look into finding a cheaper alternative to Bell for the repairs.

Bell sucks even worse than Rogers!

That is so true! When I lived in Ottawa, I switched my service from Bell to Rogers for home phone service because I'd had far too many problems with Bell to ignore. At that time, Rogers was using the Bell network for some of their home phone customers, so even though I was a Rogers customer, all repairs to the equipment were still done by Bell because Bell owned it all.

The day before my official change-over to Rogers, I called Bell to have them fix a problem with my line. The Bell technician said the problem could be fixed remotely and all I had to do was stay off the phone for 30 minutes until the repair was completed. She also told me that I would have to call Rogers for service in the future because Rogers would soon be my official home phone provider. About 45 minutes later, I picked up the phone and I had no dial-tone at all.

Since I had no phone service and I didn't even have a cell phone at that time, I had to go to a phone booth to call Rogers about my service problem. I was on hold for about 45 minutes before anyone answered. The Rogers rep. told me that he had to make an appointment for me with Bell to have them come out to fix my line.

To make a long story short, I had to call Rogers several times - and wait on hold usually for about 30 - 45 minutes each time - to have Rogers make appointments to fix my service with Bell because Bell technicians never showed up for any of the service calls. It was two weeks before my phone service was restored.

I contacted Bell by e-mail to complain (I also complained about the huge headaches they caused me when I was a Sympatico customer) and Bell eventually responded with a letter to say that the reason their techs never showed up for their appointments was because a strike that ended months before had caused a huge backlog of service calls. Does that mean that Bell made everyone wait two weeks to have their service fixed?? As "compensation" - which I never requested, I only wanted Bell to be aware of what happened - Bell sent me $5.00 in Tim Hortons coupons.

I swore after that that I would never use Bell again. Unfortunately, after I moved to this town, I realized Bell was pretty much the only choice here for phone service, so I had to give in. :roll:

Rogers is FAR from perfect, but they are the lesser of the two evils, in my opinion!

 

[jorats]

Kevin you poor thing you, you are always having problems with your phone lines. I think when your name comes up on their customer service caller ID, they make sure to give you the run around.
It might be time to look into something else altogether. Vonage perhaps? Their commercials are damn annoying but if it works?

 

[KMG365]

Bell came to fix the line this morning. I had wanted to look for a cheaper alternative to a Bell tech, but the appointment was made without my knowledge. :wink:

After he'd checked everything out, the technician said the problem was with a phone in my bedroom. According to him, the power outage we had yesterday caused a surge which killed the phone in the bedroom. That "dead" phone supposedly affected all the other phones in the house. I didn't talk to him, but if I had, I would've told him that his theory was completely wrong.

Number one, the problem with the phone line started more than 24 hours before the power outage.

Number two, the phone that he said was dead isn't dead at all. It works fine. It's also plugged into a good surge suppressor.

Number three, when fiddling with the wires yesterday in an attempt to fix the problem ourselves, we briefly got a dial tone. How could we get a dial tone if the cause of the problem was this supposedly dead phone.

The Bell tech wasn't told any of this, but it's obvious he just made up a story that sounded plausible. I'm concerned that there may really be a problem with the phone line and he thinks he fixed it, but maybe he just inadvertently bought us more time before we really have to fix things.

Kevin you poor thing you, you are always having problems with your phone lines. I think when your name comes up on their customer service caller ID, they make sure to give you the run around.
It might be time to look into something else altogether. Vonage perhaps? Their commercials are damn annoying but if it works?

I always have problems with Bell and I don't know why. Thankfully, we're moving back to the big city in the fall (probably), so once I get back, I'm dumping Bell again. At least with Rogers Home Phone, we only had to deal with having a French radio station broadcasting on our phone line.

 

[jorats]

The techs must be awful happy when they find someone that doesn't know much about the problem. Then they can just feed any kind of bs they want. To be fair though... I bet most of them might not know themselves, maybe a lack of proper training?