Advise needed.

My wife and I will be arriving in Ottawa on the 14th June and moving in to your house on the 15th. So far so good.

What I want to know is which company would you recommend for our telecommunications needs, ie. home phone, mobile (cell), internet & TV packages?

I have heard tales of the customer service from Rogers leaving a little to be desired. While I have heard that Bell Canada is more expensive.

Are these the only two to chose from?

Thanks

Russell...

I have heard of others, however, not sure that they offer full packages, ie: phone, cable & internet.

Re: Bell - I had multiple customer service issues with them, 3rd time was it for me and then switched to Rogers. So far (9 months since I switched), I have had NO problems with Rogers and yes, they are less expensive than Bell.

Since I left Bell 9 months ago, they have harrassed me with marketing phone calls and letters to switch back to them.

Good luck with your move.

With regards to mobile it all depends on whether you like your current UK mobiles and are taking them with you, or whether you want to buy a new one when you get there. If you want to keep your current phone you need to choose Rogers as they are the only one of those two that use GSM, which will also mean you can use your phone if you return to the UK at any point. If you are getting a new phone then things are a bit more confusing and you'll need to sit and compare offers and pricing plans to suit yourselves.

If you will be sending text messages to the UK from Canada, you need to use Rogers. Bell and Telus don't use GSM so cannot support international texting.

It might not be relevant for you but we find that we send texts to friends and family a lot.

What about Virgin pay as you go? Can you text the UK if you have one of their phones?

Rogers for sure, sometimes they mess up but they always put it right, i find there customer service awesome.

Bell were expensive, untrustworthy, rude and ignorant, and the final nail in the coffin was that tehy sold my # to telemarketers and I had at least 5 calls a day!!

I think so - I am just off shopping so I will check & post back later!

I get 5 telemarketing calls a day from Bell on my Bell phone; I think they're an awful company. Rogers has dishonest billing practises (negative option billing for example) and, ime, terrible customer support, but then Bell has Emily. Emily alone is reason enough to burn their building down and exterminate the fleeing staff like rats and cockroaches.

Are you sure you can't manage with Virgin?

You can text internationally from non-GSM networks but if you look in the archive, almost every problem with texting the UK is from non-GSM user.

If texting is important for anyone, I'd stick with Rogers/Fido.

Bloody cheek.

Telus works with int texting, just bought mine and sent a text to wife in the UK. Worked fine once I sorted the number out.

I have a virgin cell and you can send txt messages to the UK.

Home phone I use Primus. I have a huge difference in bills for my international calls to Europe. What I paid for a month with Rogers now pays for a year with Primus. My neighbours have international calls to other parts of the world and they use Primus too.

Just for info Virgin uses the Rogers/Fido network so yes a mobile would work texting the UK.

Bell & Telus share networks, so whilst Rogers is cheaper and will work in Europe, on Bell/Telus you will have better coverage across Canada and North America.

I thought they used Bell?