Unofficial magicJack Forum

DeepYellow

For the past 11 1/2 years I have had the same basic telephone line service with no extras (eg no voice mail, call display etc.). At the time of cancellation in Nov 2012, I was paying $31.10/month.

In the week before canceling, I spoke twice with Bell Canada customer service representatives and learned the following:

There are two ways to cancel your telephone service:
1. Give 30 days notice (and pay for another month's service)
2. Effective immediately, and Bell charges you $30.00

If 30 days notice is given in the middle of a billing period, the last bill will be prorated for the days you actually had the service - you won't be charged for a full month.

If you give 30 days notice, you can call back and have the service re-instated at no charge. I was told not to wait to call back until the very end of the 30 day period though, so you have maybe 26 days or so to re-instate the service.

I started using MJ+ on Nov 14th and wanted to keep my Bell service for a month or so as a backup before committing to MJ+ as my only phone service. Because I could re-instate Bell service up to 26 days or so after canceling, I decide to go ahead and cancel after a week of positive MJ+ experience.

When I called to cancel and said I was moving to a VoIP solution, the CS rep asked if a better rate would persuade me to stay with Bell. I asked how much and he 'made some calculations' and offered me $22.00/month, a 29% discount from $31.10!

TAKE NOTE - a possible way to reduce your Bell Canada monthly bill is to call and cancel your service by giving 30 days notice, to see if they offer you a reduction in your monthly bill to stay with Bell. There's no risk to your service if they don't make an offer and you go through with the cancellation as you can call back in a few days and re-instate the service. All of this at no cost to you and you might get a whopping discount as I was offered.

I was also offered a free one month 'ref call' service - any callers to my old number for the month after the cancellation would hear an automated message giving them my new number. I chose not to take this - I get a lot of telemarketing calls and the last thing I want is for them to get my new number.

All the Bell Canada CS reps were pleasant, helpful, professional, with no pressure or hard sell tactics.

Hope this was helpful.

DY