Update: Bell Canada Are Douchebags 2018-02-13

Some fellah in a Bell truck came by, cut the biggest tree off the lines, and pushed two smaller ones off. There are still some trees on the lines but not as bad as it used to be. Maybe Bell hired people to keep trees off the phone li... naw, that's just silly.

Bell Canada Are Douchebags 2017-09-21

There are lots of trees around my neighbourhood. So when some trees grew kind of close to the Bell Canada phone lines I wasn't surprised. However, when trees started to grow right over the phone lines I started to worry. Then, when trees actually fell on the phone lines I was starting to get bothered. As it turns out, the ButtPlonk guys actually show up now and then to trim trees off the power lines, but they don't touch the phone lines (even if they are clearly screwed).

This morning while I was out walking the dog I met up with one of my neighbours who commented that the phone lines sure looked fucked. It wasn't first time someone had mentioned it to me, but I am not a direct Bell Canada customer so I figured there wasn't much I could do. Finally this morning I decided that it was clear nobody else was going to make the call, so I phoned my ISP to see if they could at least tell me how to get someone out to clear the trees off the phone lines. After more than half an hour on hold I gave up and tried calling Bell themselves.

In significantly less than half an hour some fellah answered and eventually told me that Bell Canada simply does not clear trees off phone lines and that they have no contract with anybody to do so. I asked him if it seemed unreasonable that a corporation that owns hundreds of thousands of kilometers of cables does not employ a single person in the capacity of "get trees off phone lines". He said no.

So, here is what Bell Canada figures is not worth dealing with. These photos really don't do the trees enough justice. They really do look much worse in person. All of these photos are within about 1km of my house, I imagine the rest of the neighbourhood (and the rest of Canada) is essentially the same. Click on any of the images to see a larger picture.

Power trimmed, phone not.	Again, power trimmed, phone not.
Even more power trimmed, phone not.	Dead tree.
Big dead tree.	Another dead tree.
Hard to see, dangling tree.	Fortunately this tree fell off.
Unraveling from support line.	Unravelling even worse.

Seriously? Bell Canada's solution to this kind of stuff is to let the property owner deal with this shit? In this case I believe the property owner is the municipality since it is on the road allowance. And when the phone lines finally do break, then Bell will send someone out to have a look at what might have gone wrong? That's not even stupid, that is just douchebags shifting the burden of line maintenance to the general public. Thanks private industry, you rock!