Sympatico finally fixed my DSL problems last night. It seems that my account was set to fast mode, when the cheesy old copper we have around here really needs interleaved mode, which trades higher latency for error-correcting operation.
I’m happy now, but why did it take two calls — the second of which I was on hold to the Bell DSL centre for nearly 20 minutes — to sort this simple problem?
Seems like Bell are still doing this.