Bell Fibe not as good as Bell Satellite

Back in December, service from my ISP was less than tolerable, so I switched to Bell. At the time I was convinced to “upgrade” to Fibre from satellite. I had had satellite for a number of years, but despite the doom and gloom from the cable company, I had very few weather related outages. When it did happen, the outage was in minutes, unlike the weather related outages on cable where it lasted days. Cable gets wet and it would take days for the cable to dry out or for them to find the short. Besides, from the beginning, the signal quality was far superior.
So, other than a higher capacity PVR and more lines to record, Fibe falls short of what Bell satellite offered.
– There is no Knowledge TV on Fibe, so I lost a source of British shows. Not Bells fault, but the offering of British shows on BBC Canada is appalling. There appears to be far more “Canadian Content” than on the American channels or other specialty language channels. Thank you CRTC.
– There is no slo mo. On the satellite I was able to slow the action down to see what I missed. Sometimes it was just as simple as trying to read a note that the good guys are reading. The camera may pan on the note, but sometimes it is too fast.
– Certain shows on TV Polonia can record as series on the satellite, but Fibe treats the same series as a non series and individual shows have to be recorded. So, every two weeks, the next crop of episodes have to be recorded.
– For some reason, the CTV News has to be treated as three separate series, noon, 6pm and 11:30pm. Satellite treated them as a single show. There is no indication of any of the “series” on the PVR to indicate that it is the noon, 6pm or 11:30 pm collection. So, if the news is preempted due to some silliness in the US, then it is fun and games trying to find the last news episode. With Satellite, it was simple, it was the last one in the group.
– In the PVR, the series setting will say that there i an episode to be recorded, but no details. On the satellite, there are details about the time and episode.
Even though Fibe is running on Windows CE, Bell has a bias towards Microsoft. Though there is an IOS and Android app for Fibe, there is no app for the company that introduced tablets many years ago. So, the answer for a Windows user is to buy an IOS or android device or rent a set top box if they want a second receiver.
And…
The ads for rewind on Fibe are bogus. Only select channels can rewind and they are not consistent in how or for how long. Some shows are marked and if you catch them before they end, you can go back to the beginning. Other shows you have to go to a different channel (1000) and select shows may be around for a few weeks. These shows do not allow FF to skip commercials. …and yes, the On Demand shows have commercials. If you missed the news, you can not rewind. If you did not record it, you missed it.
Update…
As a dutiful husband I have been manually recording shows while my wife was away. So, on her return I queued up what I thought was the oldest show of her favourite series, it turned out that it was the second newest and in this episode, all the cast was killed. Maybe JR did it? I have no idea why the series continued without the cast, but it was a soap opera. My new issue is that you can select the shows by date or by name, BUT… if you chose by name, there is no secondary sort, so the last one in the list is NOT the oldest show. Even a first year programmer understands that lists may need more than a one sort criteria.

Enjoy.

John Marshall… Visio MVP Visio.MVPs.org