In my experience;
I was a bell member for 11 years and endured many outages and service interruptions, some lasted as long as 6 months. But I persevered and eventually my services were restored. My average bandwidth usage hovered around 2 Gigs per month. I’m in no way a power user or abuser of their services. My usage of the internet is sporadic at best and I was paying for a 5Mbit connection, so I expect to get 5Mbit when I need it.

Recently I began to use P2P to download Debian Linux and was shocked to discover I could not achieve a speed faster than 25KBs down. This discovery made me question Bell, they did not provide any answers as to why my traffic was slowed so much. This week I canceled my bell service in favor of another provider who was also offering a 5Mbs Service. I discover that this provider can not offer me the speed advertised on P2P, to make matters worse Bell decided to lower my bandwidth profile to 3 megs despite my providers request to give me 5Mbs of service.

So now I’m sitting on a 3Mbs profile that only allows me 1.6Mbs of speed (incorrectly configured), paying another provider for a 5Mbs service and downloading my Linux at only 25KBs or 200kbs, when I should be getting closer to 500KBs or 4000kbs. Furthermore I’m at the mercy of Bell to correct this profile issue that should never have taken place since my profile was already set correctly for a 5 meg service. The profile change took place on my official first day with my new provider and was reported to Bell by my ISP on Aug 7. What is supposed to take a maximum of 24 hours to correct has been scheduled by Bell to be corrected more than 60 hours after it was reported.

With Bells track record dealing with their competitors, according to DSL Reports and other similar websites, I expect to have many weeks of difficulty getting my profile set correctly to allow me the 5Mbs of speed I was enjoying at Bell 1 week ago. As for P2P, there are other ways to defeat Bells throttling mechanisms that I have since put into place. So Bell is now only harming their less savvy members internet experience.

Conclusions;
It’s unfair of Bell to deprive me of using the full speed of my connection, after all I’m paying for it.
To deprive me of my transfer speed when I change providers and to throttle my P2P connections with this new provider leads me to only one conclusion. Bell is trying to make my new provider appear as if they can not provide me the services offered. Therefore it’s obvious Bell is purposely sabotaging it’s competitors to prevent competition. According to numerous websites my situation is common among members who left Bell for a competitor.

Less savvy users would not know how to check the modems speed profile or recognize, despite the vendor, Bell ultimately controls the speed. So new members switching to the competition would conclude it’s the competitors fault the speed is so slow. This is clearly evident on websites like DSLreports.com.

From my perspective it appears Bell is playing games with the competition to ensure new users have a poor user experience and ultimately opt to return to Bell for a reliable service.

This opinion is based on my experiences with Bell and confirmed by my research on the web of the large number users who face the same issues that I am presently facing.

When I posted i got a page that said something like. “slow down you are posting to much or too fast”.
Happened 3x to me.

I had posted my comments on the CAIP paper in the other topic. Perhaps we’re not allowed to enter “Hugh Are Elle” in this system and why my previous attempst nevert showed up in this thread.

Cheers!