Tech: Consumer/Corporate relations: Bell Telephone, Bell Express VU TV, Bell Internet

I am so disgusted with Bell Canada from which I receive three services -- Phone (Bell Telephone), TV (Bell Express Vu satellite service), and Internet (Bell Internet to which I have been forcibly shifted from the previous email arrangements I had under Sympatico.ca). The conplexity of using these Bell services and their products has risen exponentially, degrading their previous relative value in the new intrusive and clogging arrangements which are operated as they are, under the go--ahead by the Tory time-serving bureaucrats and technocrat economists of the Canadian Radio and Television Commission. Telephony is bundled within the group's mandate.

Also, I must deal with the outsourcing of direct service to a corporation callback centre in India. As a result, the phone help for the Internet service has fallen considerably, not least of all linguistically and in regard to cultural reference. This outsourcing saves Bell Canada money, reduces the quality of service to English-speaking consumers who use the Ontario idiom for this language, and leaves the Ontario customer permanently dissatisfied.

Furthermoere, I've been more or less required to shift over from Apple applications, especially Mail.app, to the disservices called MicroSoft and its hideous Hotmail, and as a satellite to the foregoing Bell's version of so-called Bell Mail, an online gerryrigging that at present takes me nowhere.

The CRTC, presently in the hands of the Conservative Party's minority federal govt of Stephen Harper, is corrupt in its treatment of Bell customers. To my mind, this cozy relation between govt /CRTC and Bell is to the hurt of consumers, especially ordinary users and seniors like myself who are abused severely by the over-complexity of all the Bell technical "services." This horrid setup is the combined answer of govt and the tech company/ies involved, to the needs of seniors cawt in the technological crunch that is haunting my generation.

Principium Consumers Hub

It seems to me it's time to revive rW's previous regular column on consumer goods and services, g & s that so often runs amok wreaking mayhem, against the modest requirements of lower-income pensioners of older years who are systematically toyed with by these privileged financial blood-sucking corporations like Bell, at the connivance of CRTC and the Harper Conservatives which placate the greed-corporations. I need the services, not least the the convenience of Bell's 1-bill for all the three main services (there are more, like cell phonage which I don't have and don't covet), these "services" and their products do not make up for the greed-driven overcomplicated racket that is Bell Canada in Ontario.

There's one competitor remaining in Toronto (that I know of): Rogers Cable TV, phone, and Internet service. That being a clone of Bell except for TV (Bell is satellite-based, Rogers is cable-based and I guess those cable are actually Bell fibre-optics lines, actually; so, I have no real competitive option. Likewise, the Conservatives have no real competition -- the Liberals, NDP, and Bloc Quebecois are worse than the Tories, I presently think. The Conservs has the elderly ub a corner, and do not regulate Bell to make things technical plain, workable directly, and cheap.

Technotes, by Technowlb

No competition in case 1. No competition in case 2. So, again there's no remedy whereby an inner reformation of the CRTC m+t occur under Conserv provenance. And my increasingly tech- determined lifetime.