Bell Sympatico
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Bell Sympatico is the consumer-side Internet service provider division of Bell Canada. Sympatico was launched in December 1995.
Sympatico offers five tiers of service: 56K dialup, 128K "DSL Basic Lite", 256K "DSL Basic", 3 Mbit/s "High Speed" ADSL, and 4 Mbit/s "High Speed Ultra" ADSL. Sympatico currently enjoys over 1.6 million subscribers in Ontario and Quebec and is the largest ADSL ISP in Canada.
As of summer 2003, Sympatico has tried to differentiate its service from its competitors by adding Zero Knowledge's suite of antivirus, firewall and anti-spyware services for extra charge. As of spring 2004, Sympatico has added a wireless modem-router hardware upgrade and Microsoft's MSN Premium software to its portfolio.
Equipment
Sympatico mandatorily provides its own modem equipment to its subscribers with a rental fee, which is waived on some plans and promotions.
During the original test trials in 1996, Sympatico provided Westell FlexCAP II modems to its 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 caps them at 3 or 4 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.
Etymology
The name Sympatico was chosen for its universal recognition by both English and French speakers. Visually and phonetically it resembles the English and French words "sympathetic" and "sympathique", respectively.
External links
- Sympatico/MSN MSN-based portal site (http://www.sympatico.ca)
- DSLReports Sympatico forum and FAQs (http://www.dslreports.com/forum/sympat)