Friday, June 1, 2012

DSL transition frustration

Very frustrated with Internet services today.

My DSL service with NCF.ca that was previously a reselling of TekSavvy transitioned to Bell on Tuesday.  I didn't have time to transition direct to TekSavvy, only being told the transition date at the end of the work day last Friday (April 25'th).

Reverse DNS is still not working with Bell, which means email from my servers are likely being rejected as untrustworthy. I have quite a few mailing lists hosted on these servers...


I figured my transition back to TekSavvy was a good time to upgrade service, so I tried to sign up for the DSL25 service which has a 7M uplink.  Seems that this is not available in my location, so I'm signing up with a DSL12 which has a 1M uplink. A 1M uplink is mildly better than the 800K of the current service.

TekSavvy this afternoon contacted me to let me know I had to cancel my current service before TekSavvy could enable the new service.   Funny that there was no permission required to switch to Bell, but that extra paperwork needs to be done to switch away.  I have a cancellation date of June 8 now, which hopefully will allow TekSavvy to get in and have the new service enabled right away.  I'm worried that there will be yet more downtime for my servers.

Wish I knew how quickly NCF was moving to Bell, so I could transition quicker and avoid the extra steps.


I realize Bell is still involved in the last mile of the DSL service, due to the last-mile right-of-way monopolies and all that.  I want to have minimal services from Bell, Rogers, or Telus who I consider to be in conflict of interest with provision of Internet services. I can't avoid them entirely, but I can transition as far away from them as possible. TekSavvy has also shown they are willing to lobby the government to try to minimize the harm from the various monopolies the government has granted BellUsOgers.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I've been with TekSavvy many years now.

I too tried to upgrade to the 25Mbit service a few months back, but was unavailable in my area. I settled for a lower one.

I have to say I was pleasantly surprised that the downtime for this DSL upgrade was <5 min (time to change the line card). They didn't loose my static IP, subnets or anything else.

TekSavvy sent a technician to upgrade the line filter as well, so i get close to the advertized speed.

Russell McOrmond said...

Interesting -- so something actually happens with the visits that are being scheduled. For the various switches over recent years between various DSL providers there wasn't any in-premises visits. This one says there will be.

Note: I've also been with TekSavvy for many years, including for home phone and more recently an Internet over Cable service I wanted to check out.

Too bad static IPs and Subnets aren't available from TekSavvy over Cable. They could do an OpenVPN service, but don't seem to be doing that yet.