Bell Sympatico

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Bell Sympatico

Type	Subsidiary of Bell Canada
Founded	November 29, 1995
Headquarters	Montreal, Quebec
Industry	Internet Service Provider
Products	xDSL and dial-up
Website	bell.ca/sympatico

Bell Sympatico, originally and frequently called Sympatico, is the residential internet service provider division of Bell Canada. It is affiliated with MSN. As of March 2006, Sympatico had over 2 million subscribers in Ontario and Quebec and is the largest ADSL ISP in Canada.

1 History
2 Services
3 ADSL Equipment
4 Sympatico High Speed Unplugged
5 Sympatico Optimax
6 Etymology
7 See also
8 External links

[edit] History

Sympatico was launched on November 29, 1995. Originally a national service operated jointly by Canada's ILECs, the companies other than Bell (including Aliant) have since retreated to their own brands. Bell subsidiaries NorthernTel, Télébec and Northwestel continue to brand their internet services as Sympatico, and users receive an @ntl.sympatico.ca, @tlb.sympatico.ca, or @sympatico.ca email address, respectively.

Starting in summer 2003, Sympatico tried to differentiate its service from its competitors by adding Radial Point's (formerly Zero Knowledge) suite of antivirus, firewall and anti-spyware services for extra charge. In spring 2004, Sympatico added a wireless modem-router hardware upgrade and Microsoft's MSN Premium software to its portfolio.

[edit] Services

Sympatico offers five tiers of service: 56K dialup, 128K "DSL Basic Lite", 1024K "DSL Basic", 5 Mbit/s "High Speed" ADSL, and 5 Mbit/s "High Speed Ultra" ADSL. However, ADSL is not available for all customers.

In order to differentiate between Standard High Speed and Ultra High Speed, it was decided that security software and home networking equipment would be included at no extra cost. Sympatico added access to MSN Premium to all High Speed customers and removed the web email by a lightly modified Hotmail. ADSL2+ is also available in a few area of Toronto and Montreal under the trademark Optimax.

An another Sympatico-branded Internet services named Unplugged is also offered; Unplugged is a wireless service.

The Public Interest Advocacy has identified numerous customer complaints in regards to billing problems, poor technical support, and actual speeds that are less than advertised speeds.

Sympatico’s service agreement contain pre-dispute mandatory arbitration clauses, raising dangers for consumers. Mandatory arbitration clauses may result in higher costs for consumers, lack of procedural fairness, lack of transparency, exacerbate the existing contract imbalance between consumers and businesses and have minimal deterrent effect. The ISPs’ pre-dispute mandatory arbitration clauses deny class actions to consumers – a very significant loss for consumers. [1]

[edit] ADSL Equipment

For services other than dial-up, Sympatico mandatorily provides its own modem equipment to its subscribers with a rental fee, which is waived on some plans and promotions. High Speed service was launched in late 1996.

During the original test trials in 1996, Sympatico provided Westell FlexCAP II modems to its High Speed subscribers. Since then, Sympatico has upgraded their modem rollout on a nearly yearly basis.

Over the years, Sympatico supplied the Alcatel A1000, the Nortel 1MM (running on the proprietary Nortel DBIC platform), and the Alcatel SpeedTouch Home. In late 2003, Sympatico standardized on the G.DMT ADSL platform and phased out support for the Nortel DBIC platform. Going forward, Sympatico has exclusively provided Efficient Networks' Speedstream DSL modems.

As of 2004, Sympatico has been providing ADSL2-capable modems to their customers. These modems are backwards compatible with ADSL, and as such Sympatico shapes them at 5 Mbit/s like any other modem. However, they are capable of speeds of up to 24 Mbit/s, should Bell decide to take advantage of ADSL2 in the future.

[edit] Sympatico High Speed Unplugged

On March 31, 2006, Bell Canada began offering a wireless Internet solution under the Sympatico brand. The service relies on technology developed by Inukshuk Wireless Inc., a joint venture between Rogers Communications and Bell Canada. and has no affiliation to Sympatico's xDSL operations.

Sympatico Unplugged currently offers two tiers of service to both rural and urban users in ten provinces and one territory; 512kbps with a 2 GB usage threshold and 3Mbps with a 10GB threshold.

Unplugged is an OFDM Non-Line-of-Sight NLOS wireless service. The modem is a (RSU-2510-FV) NextNet Expedience Broadband Wireless Modem available as a mandatory equipment rental.

[edit] Sympatico Optimax

On July 5, 2006, Bell Canada began offering ADSL2+ based Internet access under the Sympatico brand.

Optimax currently offers two tiers of service in select areas in Montreal: 10Mbps with a 50GB threshold ($1.25 /additional GB, billed in increments of 100MB), and 16Mbps with a 75GB threshold ($1.00 /additional GB, billed in increments of 100MB, up to a maximum of 30$). Upload rates are 1Mbps. $70 a month for the 10Mbps, and $100 a month for 16Mbps. Sympatico has since released the same service for select areas of Toronto.

[edit] Etymology

The name Sympatico was chosen for its universal recognition by both English and French speakers, as both are official languages of Canada. Visually and phonetically it resembles the English and French words "sympathetic" and "sympathique" (meaning "kind"), respectively. The word is pronounced as in the Spanish "simpático" with the emphasis on the second syllable in English and the fourth in French.