Being a bell home phone and internet customer for upwards of a decade, I thought opening a cellphone contract with Bell would be good news, they offered competitive rates, and said since I was a 'valuable' customer, that they could offer good deals an incentives.
The first thing I asked when I was signing up for a contract was 'Do you offer service in Thunder Bay?'. As I planned on moving up to Thunder Bay during my contract, I thought that my mobile service should be versatile. They assured me that they did, and that they offered a number change if I decided to move to Thunder Bay.
I ended up moving temporarily, and to my suprise, there is no Bell retailer for 500 kms. I call in, and I'm informed that I can't get a 807 number. So I got stuck paying long distance and for data in a city that didn't even have 3G connectivity.
My trusty HTC Touch ended up kicking the bucket in March, and with no Bell store for miles in Thunder Bay, I had to call in to order a new phone to be shipped to me. The sales rep was eager to suggest I purchase this phone, the Motorola Dext, because it was a cheap android phone with hardware that could compete with the newest androids on the market. It all sounded good, till I read online that the software was android 1.5, an old and outdated system. The sales rep assured me that Bell had obtained the update and was planning on releasing it to the public. Sounded great, new phone and updated firmware.
That's where the nightmare began. The phone was unbelievably bugged. Dropped calls, rogue text messages (It would send random texts from old conversations to random people on my contact list.), and an extremely laggy interface. I called Motorola, and they said those problems were consistent with the older firmware, and the new android update would solve those issues.
I called Bell to see what could be done, and they informed me that Bell wasn't even planning on releasing the update for this phone. What a ripoff! I basically got conned into buying a paperweight that exploits personal conversations to my boss with its stupid rouge text messages.
The problems continued when the phone started corrupting media files. I tried every solution their tech center gave me, none of them worked. I decided I was fed up of being lied to by Bell, and tried to get a refund, or a credit toward a phone that would WORK. They told me to go into a Bell World Store, and to send it in for repairs, and if repairs were feutile, then they'd proceed in giving me a credit towards a new phone.
In store, the service rep told me that I'd have to pay $35 to ship my phone in for repairs, as well as $25 to use their abused loaner cellphone till mine was out of the repair facility, so much for paying for extended warranty, seems it covers even less than the manufactures', which is still in effect by the way. After explaining my situation to the service rep, he informed me that it is infact a software problem, and that sending it in for repairs would be useless, as they have no right to update the software in the repair centers.
This is the type of service you should expect from Bell. They jerk you around and never try to solve your REAL problem. As a student going into med, I really don't have a wad of cash to shove at Bell because they con me into buying a useless phone. It's bad enough that they do shit like this, but its even worse that they do it to long time customers like myself.
A kid in Toronto gets mugged twice, doesn't have Bell's smartphone protection plan, and his mother gets the media involved to get her son a new Samsung Galaxy S. They are quicker to give someone a new phone for something that IS NOT their fault rather than own up to their mistakes. I guess my next stop is attempting to get a local news station on the story.
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