Well I did what I had sworn I would never do - I have gone back to Bell Sympatico for my connectivity.
Not that Bell had bad service or anything before but I was tired of having everything with one company - internet, home phone and cell phone. I looked around and found better or similar deals for the services. I moved my home phone to Skype, and internet to Cogeco but kept my cell phone with Bell due to the absolutely ridiculous contract breaking fees.
Anyway that is in the past. This week I got a flyer in the mail about Bell Sympatico deals and found that I could get DSL service for $19.95 per month for the first three months and then up to $49.95 a month. Not a bad deal for the first three months but $10 more per month than I was paying Cogeco for my cable connection.
I figured I would call and see what they offered. I mentioned that I was currently with Cogeco and they offered me the same deal but instead of $49.95 per month I got it at $34.95 - the same price as what I was paying Cogeco and they would throw in a free combo modem/wireless router.
OK, I was sold and agreed to the plan.
So the package arrived today and the install went smoothly and I was up and running in about 10 minutes. Everything is good so far.
Here are the problems that I found. In all of sheets and booklets of instructions they never once provided the IP address for the router so I could go in and change the default WEP encryption to a standard that a 5 year old couldn't break in 10 minutes. A quick phone call to the help desk and I got the IP address of the router (192.168.2.1) but much to my surprise it wasn't passworded!
They never mentioned anywhere in the manuals how to connect to the router or that it might not be a bad idea to put a password on the router. Granted, they at least put some sort of encryption on the wireless idea but no mention that this standard was very poor and easily broken and should be changed along with the SSID of Bell355.
More and more I am convinced that there is a huge market out there for someone to start promoting a 'secure your wireless' service.
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