Bell Sympatico

Bell Sympatico, originally and frequently simply called Sympatico, is the consumer-side Internet service provider division of Bell Canada. Sympatico was launched in December 1995. Originally a national service operated jointly by Canada s ILECs, the companies other than Bell (including Bell subsidiary Aliant) have since retreated to their own brands.

Sympatico offers five tiers of service: 56K dial-up access, 128K DSL Basic Lite , 256K DSL Basic , 3 megabit per second High Speed ADSL, and 5 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 2003 summer 2003, Sympatico has tried to differentiate its service from its competitors by adding Zero Knowledge s suite of antivirus, Firewall (networking) and anti-spyware services for extra charge. As of 2004 spring 2004, Sympatico has added a wireless modem-router hardware upgrade and Microsoft s MSN Premium software to its portfolio.

= Equipment =

For services other than dial-up, 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 and speakers. Visually and phonetically it resembles the English and French words sympathetic and sympathique , respectively.

=External links=

*[http://www.sympatico.ca Sympatico/MSN MSN-based portal site] *[http://www.dslreports.com/forum/sympat DSLReports Sympatico forum and FAQs]