#bellinternet

Canada has very few telecommunications companies, so they all provide terrible service. However, there is an alternative. There are very small, independent service providers who provide satisfactory service at reasonable rates. The catch is that no one knows they exist.

I lived in Montreal for four years. For my first two years in Montreal, my service provider was Bell, one of the biggest telecom companies in Canada. They were horrible. They overcharged and then made it nearly impossible to cancel my services, despite the fact that I was not a contract customer, since they only allow Canadian citizens to sign contracts (and I am American).

For my back-end two years in Montreal, my internet service provider was Radioactif, one of these smaller companies. They were great. For like $40 a month, I had unlimited high speed WiFi. 

The best part was that, this company was so small, you couldn't even pay your bills online. They would email me the bill, which I then had to print, and mail back to them with a check. This sounds inconvenient and believe me, it was. It was so inconvenient that sometimes I would forget to pay a bill on time, as even the best of us do.

That was until I realized, this company was so small, they weren't even keeping track of my payments. When I'd forget to pay a bill, I'd get another bill a month later, billing me for, again, just one month. The first time it happened, I sent a check for two months. A month later, I would get a bill for $0.00 because I'd be credited as having overpaid the previous month.

I ended up only paying every-other bill--if that. My quality of service never wavered, and no one from Radioactif ever contacted me about only paying for half of my internet. For all I know, I was their only customer!

By contrast, Bell called me multiple times after I had successfully cancelled my service to tell me I still owed them random small sums of money, about $10 each time. Now that I think about it, this could have been a scam.

Anyway, things were going great with me not paying my internet bills. That is until, one day, the internet stopped working. I called their customer service. While the larger telecommunications services offer customer representatives who speak your choice of French or English, this small Quebecois-internet provider's customer service representative only spoke French. That's right, "representative." There was only one. Every time I called, it was the same guy. 

This guy--we'll call him François--could not help me over the phone. I spent several days on the phone with him and nothing was accomplished by these "conversations." Eventually we figured out that they would send a technician. 

The technician was not a Radioactif technician. He was, of all things, a Bell technician--the very same fuckers who kept hitting me up for random sums of petty cash after I thought I was done with them. I didn't say anything about this to him, though, because I was afraid he'd try to shake me down for my pocket change right then and there.

The technician was a nice enough guy. He monkeyed around with our modem for a while, then walked around the apartment building with this device that was like a metal-detector, but it only detected WiFi signals.

He came back and told me that the problem was a fiberoptic cable under the street (city property). He asked me for my Bell Customer ID, so they could arrange with the city to make the repair.

I told him that I was not a Bell customer, I was a Radioactif customer. He had never even heard of Radioactif.

Was it even real? Did I ever have internet at all? Was I just imagining that I had had internet this whole time?

More realistically, this small internet provider probably just outsources Bell technicians on freelance or something, and Bell doesn't tell their own technicians this. 

So when I explained to him that I didn't have a Bell customer ID because I was not a Bell customer, he muttered something about how he'd call my provider and they'd sort it out for me.

Obviously this company that couldn't even afford to hire a debt collection agency was in no position to be tearing up roads on busy Montreal streets, so our internet was never fixed.