Bell Canada Caught Lying In Advertisements… Continues Advertising Because It Doesn't Believe Ad Review Group

from the hear-no-evil... dept

Bell Canada is taking an interesting approach to being called out for lying in its ads to consumers concerning network performance: it’s simply ignoring the whole thing. Advertising Standards Canada (ASC) found that Bell Canada was being quite misleading in claiming that Bell Canada was the “fastest network across North America.” Now, there may be different ways to judge the speed of broadband offered on a network, and you would think that a company would respond with some data to support its side. Bell Canada, on the other hand, has said that it simply doesn’t recognize ASC as a legitimate organization, and therefore, it can go about its business and advertising.

Filed Under: ,
Companies: bell canada

Rate this comment as insightful
Rate this comment as funny
You have rated this comment as insightful
You have rated this comment as funny
Flag this comment as abusive/trolling/spam
You have flagged this comment
The first word has already been claimed
The last word has already been claimed
Insightful Lightbulb icon Funny Laughing icon Abusive/trolling/spam Flag icon Insightful badge Lightbulb icon Funny badge Laughing icon Comments icon

Comments on “Bell Canada Caught Lying In Advertisements… Continues Advertising Because It Doesn't Believe Ad Review Group”

Subscribe: RSS Leave a comment
23 Comments
zergy says:

who has better experience.

Personal Experience. Bell highspeed sucked from when I first had it 10 years ago. It was the onlything available at the time. Switched to the other guy’s and haven’t looked back. Only thing good about bell is its a different IP everytime you connect. But connection was always lousy. But thats my experience. Bell service and products have never been good. But people says the same about who I’m with now. They are with bell for the poor service and products. Sorry way off topic. Just ranting

ScytheNoire (profile) says:

It's Bell

Bell Canada is known for it’s corruption and abuse of power. The government has given it way too much and allowed it to do whatever it wants. It continues to illegally throttled competition, and so lying in advertising is just par for the course as far as Bell Canada goes.

If this was an American company, there would be monopoly and antitrust lawsuits galore.

Geoff C says:

Bell Service [Internet DSL]

we had Bell’s DSL service the very first week that it was available in Guelph, and it was never as fast as promised.
Bell wanted to charge us $55.00 + taxes to come and clean the terminal block contacts in this apt.bldg. I used to install tel equipment, and if the contacts were not clean, then voice and DSL would always be a problem.
Bell lost over $300.00 per month of business from us, because of this silly charge! Bell will never be any different until there is a wholesale change of the old Bell managers and execs, IMHO.
Rogers service is great and is as promised!
Bye, bye, Bell! And go clean your public pay ‘phone once a year would be great too!

John Wilson (profile) says:

Re: Bell Service [Internet DSL]

Lemme see here. Bell diagnosed dirty contacts on a terminal block and wants to charge you.

I admit that’s interesting. Must be some old screw down terminal because if it’s punch down one pair of corroded pins would mean far more of them there. If the it’s BIX the problem would be worse. (Yes, I’m familiar with telecom.)

Still, it strikes me that Bell would be much better off to clean the entire problem block and eat the cost for the simple reason that they’d retain customers. I guess not. Doesn’t take long on punch down, either. (There’s even simple ways to get early corrosion out of BIX though if it’s advanced it’s impossible. I’d be more concerned about how it got there in the first place.) For an R15 block about 2 minutes a pair.

I guess in Ontario Bell doesn’t face as aggressive a competitor as Shaw vs Telus in the West. (To say that Rogers was hated out here is a serious understatement.) So both Shaw and Telus here go out of their way to clean up minor irritants like this.

As for Bell being the fastest broadband available in its service area I’d take that with a huge grain of salt. Every delivery system has it’s pluses and minuses right down to the capacity of twisted pair vs cable. Being the fastest in downtown Toronto, again a doubtful claim, doesn’t interest me if I want high speed in Wawa.

Oh, and pay stations aren’t cleaned because Telcos lose money on them. Lots of it, I’m afraid.

Francois Desfosses says:

Bell

Woot! something i can talk about!!! as being an old CGI employee, serving Bell Canada Client, specificaly, the technician who installed the telephone, internet, expressvue, i was partly in charge of the system that controls all that tech stuff…

lets be honest on something… all external GWI’s are equiped with let’s say 1 or 2 100MB net card… standard… and inside a GWI’s, you can have arround 2000 client for highspeed. if all 2000 are connected at the same time… they will be dirrected to those 2 network cards…. now make the count!

as a matter of facts, Bell systems, never guarante their speed. they allways says that IF you are under 4 KM of cables between you and the C.O. you are guaranted to have a connection, outside the 4 KM of cable, you are treaded as best effort support.

Bell is loaning their equipment to other companys… behind the wires, if other companies are using difefrent technologies, yes they can become faster than Bell, BUT still, if these cpompanies are using Bell infrastructure, they still are limited of 4 KM of wires before having a signal loss…

so in my opinion, even tho i could had a bell highspeed (well, suposed to be highspeed) at half price, due to me working at CGI, i ALWAYS been with VIDEOTRON. CABLE POWER!!! coaxial is the best for signal quality, and the network is sisco based, mac filtered cells, so if someone steel my cable modem, he cant use it…

thats why Bell had to create their connectivity software, they couldnt control who was logged in… so if someone stole the HS modem, in the past, they just had to connect it to a phone line somewhere else, just praying that the GWI’s had network card in it… and BOOM, internet access free… isnt it AMAZING! i love uncle TOM (tete a claques)

and im not talking about internet technical support of Bell…

the main trouble, is Bell relied too long on their current equipment… regular RJ11 Cables are outdated… their old equipment is failling, there is not much upgradability for better speed, so they need a bigger bandwith, and knowing the current Bell position, they wont do that for a long period of time… resession hit hards on big companies, and videotron stroke hard on bell too, they had to cut a lot of staff, and cgi too had to. so before that bell is gonna change all their infra, they will still use RJ11 for a long time…

they where the only phone companies for too long, and they just sit down on their customers/clients without taking care of them, now that there is other competitors, they have to rethink everything… and lovely, they do it by sending support outside to india!

live long and prosper VIDEOTRON…

Fred Neathway says:

bell incompatance and theivery

I was a bell user for years and then I started looking at my bills and there was a lot of discrepancies,but I could never get anybody to care I would get somebody I could not understand or never get a response,this went on for months and finally I cancelled all ties with bell and now I get calls and junk mail every week I will never go back to bell and they are ripping people off and should be stopped

Leave a Reply to John Wilson Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Have a Techdirt Account? Sign in now. Want one? Register here

Comment Options:

Make this the or (get credits or sign in to see balance) what's this?

What's this?

Techdirt community members with Techdirt Credits can spotlight a comment as either the "First Word" or "Last Word" on a particular comment thread. Credits can be purchased at the Techdirt Insider Shop »

Follow Techdirt

Techdirt Daily Newsletter

Ctrl-Alt-Speech

A weekly news podcast from
Mike Masnick & Ben Whitelaw

Subscribe now to Ctrl-Alt-Speech »
Techdirt Deals
Techdirt Insider Discord
The latest chatter on the Techdirt Insider Discord channel...
Loading...