After some 20 years with Bell, we finally ditched them as our service provider this summer and haven’t looked back!!!

Never have I experienced such poor quality of services (years of crackling on phone lines, Internet disruptions/instability), but worst of all is their customer service which is dismal. They make the mistakes and then tell you to calm down.  They mistakenly cancelled all our services on 2 occasions (and the service reps laughed at us), misbilled us and couldn’t fix it promptly (when I say promptly, I mean within a month’s time) and God only knows how much time I’ve spent on the phone with them to resolve their issues over the years.  They’ve made me rewire my entire house, buy a new phone, … and as I always told them it had nothing to do with our setup, it was their setup that was flawed, but their own personnel couldn’t figure it out for months and kept telling us to do this and that because they had no clue!

The only time I ever got any real service was when I sent an e-mail to the president of Bell, promptly got a phone call back from the VP and things were quickly fixed, but one should not need to do so and their contact information is not publicly available (I was able to figure it out by doing some serious digging because I had enough of their customer service run around).

Anyways, the point of this post was not to continue bringing up all there problems (I could go on all day as I have years of issues to elaborate on), …

No, the point of this post is to inform people, especially people living in the Greater Montreal area that there are numerous very viable options to get away from the BIG multinational service providers and start being treated like an actual human being rather than a number.

I Googled to see what was available, compared websites, spoke to friends and family and came up with several options available to us.

One website I found useful was Internet providers in Montreal in which I started looking at companies such as:

• AEI
• Bravo Telecom
• TekSavvy
• …

Then this summer, we made what felt like a leap, but in reality was the easiest thing we ever did. We now get faster, cheaper Internet with almost double to the monthly capacity (we don’t need unlimited) and we also switched over to VOIP telephone so we only pay 40$/year for our phone and get all the bells and whistles and we can call anywhere in Canada and the US at no charge (BELL charges more than that for a single month with their basic plan with which we can’t call outside of Quebec without incurring extra charges)!  The service took 10 minutes to install and I was up and running.  Everything has been running smooth ever since (it must be 4-5 month in now).

All of this to say, if you:

• Aren’t happy with your current service provider
• Find you are monthly bill is excessive
• Etc …

I’d urge you to look around because there truly are good options available to you.

Lastly, one thing I will mention was that when I researched my options, numerous people (and I do mean a lot of people) kept telling me to switch to Videotron. Everyone that mentioned Videotron mentioned how good their customer service was and how they never experienced any issues.  I personally was no longer interested in using one of the Big Telecom companies and went with a smaller local company, but I thought I’d mention it in case it could help any of you.