Caleb Hunt (.com)

*edit* April 15 – Heh, waddya know. Checked my Visa statement today, saw the credit was posted yesterday.

I’m a huge fan of pre-authorized payments. I bill almost everything automatically to my credit card. I like not having to remember to pay my bills and only pay one bill at the end of the month. I usually don’t have any issues, but Bell Mobility has made me re-think my pre-authorized payment route on some of my services.

See, my cell contract was up with Bell in January. I put my cancellation notice in with them 30 days in advance and asked them the exact day I could port my number out without penalty. I documented the rep’s response, got her name and number, and on that fateful day in January – said ‘bye-bye’ to Bell Mobility. I was fully aware that I would be getting one final bill from Bell, which I did. However, one month after that – I was billed $200 for an ‘early-cancellation fee’.

Livid, to say the least, I called Bell back and was like “OK – what gives, I have confirmation from Christina emp# 6021736 that there is NO cancellation fee”. After 25 minutes of holding, the rep comes back and says ‘You’re right, that was an error, we’ll issue a you a cheque for the balance because your account has already been closed and we have already debited your credit card’. No $&*@, you debited my Visa $200+tax, and I want my money back.

It’s now been over 90 days, I’ve since placed two calls to Bell Mobility (each a month apart) saying ‘Where’s my money? I’ve been out this money now for 3 months… I’d kind of like it back, it’s not yours, why am I waiting so long for this?” Each time ‘oh sir, it’s coming it’ll be there in a couple weeks’.

I know it’s only $200, but it’s the principle. They took it, it was their fault, now I have to play the waiting game simply because I was a good customer who every month paid their bill without fail thanks to a pre-authorized credit card bill. Of course there’s no urgency now,  I’m not a customer, they can’t simply credit my account – and for whatever reason, can’t refund it directly to my card. It’s a joke.

If I wasn’t on pre-authorized billing, I would have called them to say ‘I’m not paying this bill, it’s wrong’ and they would have said ‘You’re right, ignore it – it’s been cancelled’. Why is this such a hassle?

To anyone thinking about cancelling any service you have, I HIGHLY recommend that before you cancel, you take pre-authorized billing off your account so that when the final bill comes – you can pay it however you like, you’re not at the mercy of the company who’s billing to have their systems straight.

Screw you Bell… Last time I recommend your services to anyone.

My feeds yesterday updated me on a new BlackBerry application that allowed me to tether my device to my laptop and using my “unlimited data” that I pay for as part of my cell service with Bell Mobility – so I decided to give it a whirl, and here I am – posting without the use of any wired or wireless networks just my laptop, BlackBerry 8830 World Edition and a Mini USB cable.

I ran some tests last month to test the EV-DO network speeds but more so to see whether or not I’d end up being charged for tethering my phone to my laptop, and after a few (fairly impressive) speed tests and a few megabytes of data transfer I decided to call it quits fearing what could be $8/MB transfer charges – Yikes.

Here were my results using the direct connection to Bell when I tested it first time around:

Not too shabby… I could deal with speeds like that when needing to get on the net in a pinch. Now, The billing cycle came and went, and to my surprise there was no charges. Could my unlimited data package (which has some special promo codes on it) actually be unlimited?

See, this is the thing that has always ticked me (as well as hundreds of other Canadians) off about “unlimited data plans”. They are indeed unlimited for data transfer, but only provided that the data you transfer (browsing/email/Internet usage) is done on the wireless device itself. Tethering is completely excluded, and quite obviously discouraged at an atrocious rate of $8/MB as previously mentioned. This past year, Rogers allowed for their data allotment in their plans to be used “however the consumer wanted” – on device or tethered, it didn’t matter. If you paid for 500MB of Internet, use it how you like. What a novel concept… Too bad the other guys haven’t caught on (or are just choosing to ignore it all together).

Anyway, I’m off topic… Back to TetherBerry. TetherBerry promises: “No Tethering Fees: TetherBerry uses your phone’s data plan, so you will not see tethering fees” which is pretty cool. So, I decided to give it a shot, and here I am posting from my TetherBerry’d Internet connection.

Here’s a speed test result from last night:

Ehh… Not too bad, definitely useful. Upload cut in half, but downstream speeds are equivalent. If you note, the ISP is no longer Bell Mobility – but rather Abacus America, which appears to be located in California. Makes sense why the ping latency (and distance) is much higher in the result using TetherBerry.

I plugged back in and tethered using Bell directly again, and here were the results connecting to the same server and running the speed test again.

These results are even better than before!

I also decided to give TetherBerry the benefit of the doubt, and tested the service using a server closer to where it thought I was in California which produced similar results as to my first test connecting to a server in Toronto:

So, my un-scientific test results using TetherBerry are yielding speeds approximately half that of my un-filtered, non re-routed tethered connection directly to Bell Mobility. 

I’d also like to note, that I fired up my BitTorrent client and using the port I normally do and couldn’t get any incoming connections to be allowed using TetherBerry. From what I could tell – it was firewalled, where as it was no problem using my unfiltered Bell connection. This was a bit of a drag to realize…

Anyway all this to say that TetherBerry works and works fairly well, It does what it promises although in my test results, does do it slower. It appears that as of Monday they are going to cut everyone off unless they subscribe to a paid subscription. Now, If I was being charged to tether on my unlimited plan (which as of now, doesn’t look like I am) then this may be something that I would consider paying for – but as of now, not likely. However, I do know that there are alot of Bell / Telus / Verizon etc… users out there who are going to love it, will certainly pay for it – and I’m sure it’ll be a success. Great job TetherBerry!

You can find out more info on TetherBerry (and download the Beta) here (but only for a couple more days!) and follow them on Twitter here