[kwlug-disc] OT: Non-satellite alternatives to Rogers Cable?

[Chris Irwin]

On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 01:17, unsolicited <unsolicited at swiz.ca> wrote:
> There seems to be a better feeling at TekSavvy, at least they seem to have a
> responsive customer service department [...]

I was a Teksavvy DSL customer for about four years, and I jumped to
Teksavvy cable as soon as it was introduced in my area. There are
definitely growing pains. There are multiple issues causing problems
with Teksavvy's cable offering. Insufficient bandwidth between Rogers
and Teksavvy, which can throttle an entire city. But apparently that
is sometimes not as pronounced on the Teksavvy side as local node
congestion throttles everybody on the Rogers side, so Teksavvy can
actually see headroom. For areas that are heavily affected, they've
introduced stop-sells, so you can't sign up until some of the issues
are resolved. I'm not sure if K/W is one of those areas or not. This
is all information I've read from the dslreports forum on Teksavvy.

In my experience, sometimes speed drops quite considerably. I have
24Mbit service, and off-peak I've seen it spike up to 48Mbps
("speedboost", which is temproary) before trailing back to normal
speeds. At peak times, it is not unsurprising to max out at 5Mbit
(I've even seen 2). On the bright side, latency is not affected.

It is somewhat disappointing, but I would be killed with overage
charges on Bell or Rogers (in addition to paying more to start), and
other TPIA providers apparently have similar issues.

> Oh, and to fire up a 2nd cable service, at least until the new install is
> proven, is an $80 charge. And there are lots of forum posts on transfers
> from Rogers to Acanac where multi-month service delays (so no internet in
> the mean time) are reported.

There apparently has been a few issues with moving from Rogers. Unlike
switching your DSL login on your router, the cable network actually
identifies you by your modem's MAC address. There have been issues
with migrating and having Rogers properly switch your MAC from Rogers
to Teksavvy.

A second issue is that your line might not be tagged for "TPIA" (Third
Party Internet Access). At some point your cancellation comes up on
some report and your cable is disconnected during an audit. Apparently
that can happen 2-3 months after you sign up.

I didn't have any issues, but I was never a Rogers customer and bought
a pre-registered modem from Teksavvy.

-- 
Chris Irwin
<chris at chrisirwin.ca>