« Increases from Bell Canada »

If you live in Ontario and you are a Bell Canada customer for telephone services, chances are you got a lovely letter stating that your monthly service fee is going to increase in the new year.

Huh.

The increase is about 4.5%.

For a service that hasn’t change or improved in over 10 years. No innovation, no feature changes, no nothing. It’s pretty ballsy to foist an increase at this point.

The last time that Bell Canada had a product improvement on standard phone service was the introduction of call waiting and call display. 

I get it - it’s a legacy service. Product enhancements aren’t expected. However —— it’s a legacy service, it should NOT have price increases. If I was an enterprise customer, pricing would be going in the other direction.

I want a phone service that can do a few new things:

1. I want to be able to block telemarketers
2. I want to have different ring tones
3. I want to specify when I want the phone to ring, and when I want it to be mute.
4. Depending on who calls, I want to play a different voice mail recording.

Funnily enough, I bough a very cool Uniden handset last month, and it can do three of the four tricks I want Bell Canada to do. If I was still with Primus, their Talk Broadband did EVERYTHING I wanted. Unfortunately, with changes in the working arrangements in the house, we found ourselves not needing two phone lines, and Primus had to take it on the chin.

The ONLY reason we have a Bell phone line is for the ridiculous ease of ordering PPV movies. Now that I have Apple TV - we don’t even need to have a phone line for PPV, since I can’t remember the last time I ordered a movie from Bell…..

Good job Bell —- you have now convinced me I don’t have any compelling reason to keep your home phone service. You really should have left *well enough* alone.