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cowofwar
Jul 30, 2002

by Athanatos
After correcting for inflation I'm paying the same amount now as I did ten years ago for significantly worse internet service. I used to have an unlimited (~100gig) cap with speeds of up to 7mbit and now have some terrible garbage 30gig package at the same speeds. The telecom situation is a joke in Canada. Revenue per customer is the highest in the world for cell phones and I'm sure it will soon be the same for net connections.

The most ridiculous thing is the packages offered by ISPs. They increase your speeds with better packages but barely touch the bandwidth allotment. So once you're past the midrange package they start gouging you with no mercy. And honestly, 30gigs of bandwidth is laughable in this day and age.

3/10/$25
7/30/$32
14/60/$42
16/125/$76
30/125/$60
50/150/$100

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cowofwar
Jul 30, 2002

by Athanatos

Ceyton posted:

At least the USA has pockets of good service here and there. Show me a place in Canada where I can get a fiber circuit to my house for less than the equivalent of a full-time salary. Or even a 20+ mbps unmetered connection.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_to_the_premises_by_country#Canada

I live about 100km from wightman telecom service area. 20mbps, $39/mo, unmetered. Looks like that's just about the only decent provider in canada though.

cowofwar
Jul 30, 2002

by Athanatos

Nitr0 posted:

I think you're forgetting that a majority of Canadians live in areas where high speed internet isn't reliable or even that fast. People are lucky to get 4Mb/s on DSL in most areas. Satellite and cable will be around for a long while still.
According to the 2009 census the population of canada is ~ 34 million and 23 million of those live in major metropolitan areas.

So yeah, no.

quote:

St. John's (N.L.) 187.6
Halifax (N.S.) 398
Moncton (N.B.)1 133.9
Saint John (N.B.) 126.6
Saguenay (Que.) 151.7
Québec (Que.) 746.3
Sherbrooke (Que.) 194.6
Trois-Rivières (Que.) 145.1
Montréal (Que.) 3,814.70
Ottawa-Gatineau (Ont.-Que.) 1,220.70
Kingston (Ont.) 160.7
Peterborough (Ont.)1 121.4
Oshawa (Ont.) 361.4
Toronto (Ont.) 5,623.50
Hamilton (Ont.) 739.4
St. Catharines-Niagara (Ont.) 404.4
Kitchener-Cambridge-Waterloo (Ont.) 489.1
Brantford (Ont.)1 137.7
Guelph (Ont.)1 135.9
London (Ont.) 489.3
Windsor (Ont.) 331.5
Barrie (Ont.)1 190.4
Greater Sudbury (Ont.) 165.3
Thunder Bay (Ont.) 124.8
Winnipeg (Man.) 742.4
Regina (Sask.) 210
Saskatoon (Sask.) 257.3
Calgary (Alta.) 1,230.20
Edmonton (Alta.) 1,155.40
Kelowna (B.C.)1 178.4
Abbotsford-Mission (B.C.) 173.7
Vancouver (B.C.) 2,328.00
Victoria (B.C.) 352.4
Total 23221.8

cowofwar fucked around with this message at 22:12 on Nov 18, 2010

cowofwar
Jul 30, 2002

by Athanatos
Meanwhile all the political parties argue over stupid, irrelevant poo poo.

cowofwar
Jul 30, 2002

by Athanatos

Godinster posted:

God I loving hate Bell.
The fact that you could exceed the best Fibre package's bandwidth in less than seven hours is hilariously sad. Why don't the carriers just reintroduce dial up modems. I remember back around 1999 when I had shaw cable internet. Now it costs more and you get less. The industry is a stagnant joke.

cowofwar
Jul 30, 2002

by Athanatos

less than three posted:

For any of you who switched to Telus (or remember their PR guy saying on TV that they wouldn't be charging overages.)


Pretty sure the status quo is lying about not loving you in the rear end just until you turn around at which point you get hosed in the rear end.

Or perhaps, you are being hosed in the rear end on the street when a kind man offers you safety in his house, thankful for the offer you accept and enter the house at which point he locks you in the basement and fucks you in the rear end for three years.

cowofwar
Jul 30, 2002

by Athanatos

Nitr0 posted:

Maybe they're going to use that additional revenue to upgrade! :x
You just posted a quote saying that Telus is dumping $500,000,000 into some useless wireless services. If their backend needed upgrades it would get priority. The fact that they're spending infrastructure money on wireless services suggests that they have tons of excess capacity on the wired end.

cowofwar
Jul 30, 2002

by Athanatos
Can you imagine having to be the staffer that has to explain how ISPs work to a dinosaur CPC politician? Even the young ones are retards that can probably barely work a computer.

cowofwar
Jul 30, 2002

by Athanatos
Most utilities will charge you a basic fee for service and then a usage fee. So like $10/month as a base fee then your usage on top of that at market rates. Electric utilities, water utilities and gas utilities all already do this. So isn't the problem just establishing a fair market rate for bandwidth? Why can't I see the following on my bill?

$10: account and infrastructure base fee
$0.25: 5gb @ 0.05/gb
$10.25 total

Why isn't this an option? Is it because the monopolies own the infrastructure which means they can set the bandwidth cost to whatever they want? I mean $2 per gigabyte is ludicrous and obviously being set out of thin air.

cowofwar
Jul 30, 2002

by Athanatos
Here I made you guys something.

Only registered members can see post attachments!

cowofwar
Jul 30, 2002

by Athanatos

quote:

as a general rule, ordinary consumers served by Small ISPs should not have to fund the bandwidth used by the heaviest residential Internet consumers
I thought it was established that bandwidth costs are nominal and that all the expenses are recouped by the flat rate and that there is no subsidization at this point.

cowofwar
Jul 30, 2002

by Athanatos

The Gunslinger posted:

I submitted some pretty lengthy comments but I forgot to use an analogy involving cars and electricity so the CRTC will probably disregard them.
No, they will be disregarded because your job title doesn't include "Bell" or "Rogers".

cowofwar
Jul 30, 2002

by Athanatos
Bell wants to talk about "fairness".

cowofwar
Jul 30, 2002

by Athanatos
If I get a phone line I can talk as much as I want.

If I get a TV package I can watch as much TV as I want.

If I get an internet plan I can only use it at max speed for six hours a month.

And Bell wants to talk about 'fairness'.

cowofwar
Jul 30, 2002

by Athanatos
It's basically double dipping.

If Bell tiered its internet packages based on data transfer caps 90+% of the population would get the cheapest package. But if they tier it based on speeds they probably get a much higher number of people springing for the more expensive packages because 'faster' is a much more easily understood metric than 'more data'.

And then Bell decides to double dip by now putting caps on the plans. So paying an extra $50 a month only gets you speed, you need to pay another $50 on top of that to get higher data limits.

Basically the same thing that airlines are doing. Take one old simple service, break it down into its basic components and then charge the user for each component. a $499 flight now becomes a $400 flight + $100 taxes + $40 baggage + $20 food + $20 convenience charges, etc.. A customer will pay more overall if instead of getting one thing he now gets two.

Need to make more money off your chocolate bars? Replace the one 100g bar with two 40g bars and then market it as 'more'.

cowofwar fucked around with this message at 05:50 on Feb 11, 2011

cowofwar
Jul 30, 2002

by Athanatos

l33t HAXOR posted:

In case anyone missed the closing statements on The Agenda last night it's worth a watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=IlHpHxRhNs0
This is amazing.

cowofwar
Jul 30, 2002

by Athanatos


Cogecrap. Hopefully that speedtest didn't blow through my tiny bandwidth limit.

cowofwar
Jul 30, 2002

by Athanatos
To be honest if you're using wireless to provide a net connection to your main computer on which you want speedy transfers you're retarded. Wireless is for the laptop on the couch or the iPad in the kitchen; not for the office computer.

I see people doing this all time. They have their cable modem plugged into a wireless router right next to their main computer picking up signal via wifi and then they complain about latency and speeds.

cowofwar
Jul 30, 2002

by Athanatos

PhancyPants posted:

The laptop on the couch was the only place I was trying anything out, mostly because I was also breaking in a new sectional this weekend as well. The laptop, my phone, and my iPad are the only things I use wifi on, but they also make up 90% of my home computing. Everything else is wired in with gigE for transcoded video from my office PC.

If you have decent signal and only a few devices though, your wifi should be able to outperform your internet feed. Your wireless router also shouldn't be introducing a tonne of latency either.

I'm not defending a 6" distance wireless connection for a desktop PC, but if moving to a wireless connection drastically alters your internet performance than you have other issues that need to be addressed.
People can do what they want, but someone mentioned that they were in a building saturated with wifi signals. Even with small distances in a building like that you can get a lot of interference and noise affecting the quality of your signal. Personally, I just have a patch cable hanging around my couch for my laptop since I'd rather not have to worry about signal issues at all (plus it's hard to fight the urge not to do your banking on the couch instead of your more secured wired computer).

cowofwar
Jul 30, 2002

by Athanatos

teethgrinder posted:

Tony Clement was a good ally in the first round.
Only because they were a minority government. They now have a stable majority and no longer have to give a poo poo about anything.

cowofwar
Jul 30, 2002

by Athanatos
People still have 10mbps gateways and routers. Obviously if a customer is getting 10mbps instead of 15mbps they would want to make sure that it's not a hardware limitation. Also since it sounds like you're using wireless and your computer is far away it could simply be a wi-fi issue.

I don't understand why you don't have a wired connection to your computer. Go buy a fifty foot ethernet cable and enjoy all the benefits of having to use wi-fi.

cowofwar
Jul 30, 2002

by Athanatos

Twiin posted:

I've got a wired connection. No WiFi.
Then why can't you just unplug the cable going from your computer to your router and plug it directly in to your modem?

cowofwar
Jul 30, 2002

by Athanatos
Awesome: http://stopthecap.com/2011/08/03/cogeco-customers-pay-for-companys-european-mess-rate-hikes-sooth-portuguese-write-off/

So we have Cogeco and neither TekSavvy DSL nor cable is available to us. gently caress monopolies.

cowofwar
Jul 30, 2002

by Athanatos

Kachunkachunk posted:

I always thought that the plural of Lego was still Lego, too. :P

Edit: For example, "Look at all that Lego!"
It is Lego for both plural and singular. Dumb people have just caused the expansion of use of "legos".

cowofwar
Jul 30, 2002

by Athanatos
If my internet goes out and I'm a residential customer I don't see why I'm not entitled to get pissed off. The internet is a utility just like gas and hydro. Those rarely go out and if they do it's only because of some significant event.

ISP service goes down all the time and it should not be acceptable. My lovely Cogeco connection dies at least once every night early in the morning because those assholes think that just because less people are using it in the early morning it is acceptable to power cycle their equipment or do maintenance.

The fact that being able to pause/resume incomplete downloads is so prevalent is a sad testament to the shitness of ISPs. When you're browing the net you don't notice the periodic hiccups but when you need to maintain an open connection for eight hours you sure notice.

cowofwar fucked around with this message at 23:48 on Sep 5, 2011

cowofwar
Jul 30, 2002

by Athanatos

MA-Horus posted:

Cogeco is honestly a really bad ISP. As bad as the rest of them (Teksavvy excluded I suppose). When I was working there I'd say anywhere from 1/4-1/2 of the issues I dealt with were company related, not customer related. Slow/Intermittent speeds because the techs didn't wanna do a proper install, hilariously crappy modems, constant outages, blatant lies from sales staff(Oh yes sir, that 5 year old samsung modem will be able to do your HSIPro connection-No it won't because it can't but throughput faster than 10mbps) Just a terrible company all round.
Cogeco rocks:


No wait, it's terrible.

cowofwar
Jul 30, 2002

by Athanatos

Daynab posted:

So what happened today with satellites? Xplornet went down from something like 7 am and didn't come back up till 1 am, and strangely Shaw tv also went down and came up at around the same time.
Read an article about some satellite losing altitude control and going in to safety mode (pointing at sun).

cowofwar
Jul 30, 2002

by Athanatos

Im_Special posted:

Is it just me or does Telus just not monitor bandwidth usage? I've never seen there usage tracker ever work under my account page and I've monitored my own bandwidth from my router that ranged in the 300-500~ in just one month just to see if Telus would react and they never do, did I some how fall through the cracks and have unlimited usage? This has been going on for maybe 9 years.
Most companies say per month but they actually monitor over an averaged window of a couple months. So a spike in a month wont get their attention but constant high transfer will.

cowofwar
Jul 30, 2002

by Athanatos
Seems like you could just have a separate torrent box then format an ghost it every month after copying your files to a flash drive.

cowofwar
Jul 30, 2002

by Athanatos
I have both an appleTV and a mac mini hooked up to my TV and they complement each other well. I can grab almost anything I want from torrents or web page streams on the mac mini.

cowofwar
Jul 30, 2002

by Athanatos


So Cogeco sucks rear end. We pay for the Turbo 20 plan and get like 20% of that speed in evenings.

cowofwar
Jul 30, 2002

by Athanatos

cowofwar posted:



So Cogeco sucks rear end. We pay for the Turbo 20 plan and get like 20% of that speed in evenings.
So how would you guys approach talking to Cogeco about unacceptable service? What hoops will they make me jump through?

cowofwar
Jul 30, 2002

by Athanatos

rhag posted:

For me both those points do not make any sense whatsoever. I do not see anything "smug" about them, just nonsense "consumer grade" networking. There is no reason whatsoever for anyone to use that, other than laziness.
This is smug as can be. Either you're trolling or autistic or something.

cowofwar
Jul 30, 2002

by Athanatos
I pay cogeco for 20mbps and it was doing 1mbps last night as usual.

cowofwar
Jul 30, 2002

by Athanatos
Ugh. The LTE on my Rogers iPhone demolishes my Cogeco cable wireless on the same phone. The cable has poo poo latency, poo poo bandwidth, and constantly drops. It's embarassing.

cowofwar
Jul 30, 2002

by Athanatos

CirrusPlanetSteve posted:

I put together some info about the changes, I encourage everyone to repost this anywhere Canadians can see it. This is ridculous and borderline robbery, call down or go into a chat and be vocal about it. Just remember you are yelling at Shaw not the frontline staff.

Old plans, before and after January rate hike
10/0.5 125GB Cap: $55>$59
25/2.5 250GB Cap: $60>$67
50/3 400GB Cap: $80>$85
100/5 500GB Cap: $90>$99

*Option exists on 10/25/50 to add unlimited data for $100 more a month


New Plans
5/0.5 60GB Cap: $50
15/0.5 125GB Cap: $60
30/2.5 250GB Cap: $70
60/3 400GB Cap: $90

*No unlimited options
Admission of having an oversold network with insufficient capacity to handle average usage climbing from 1% to 10% due to netflix and such.

cowofwar
Jul 30, 2002

by Athanatos
My dry loop fee for DSL through teksavvy was just $5.

cowofwar
Jul 30, 2002

by Athanatos

Vintersorg posted:

Shaw did what everyone found out even after they said they wouldn't.

https://www.reddit.com/r/canada/comments/2ri6ma/as_promised_shaw_lowered_their_speeds_by_60_for/

As visible on their website, you'll notice all price tiers are now 60% slower.
For example 25Mb/s used to be $60, now that only gets your 15Mb/s.
100Mb/s used to be $90, now that only gets you 60Mb/s (also with no option for any faster internet)
This is a follow up to this post.
I'm disappointed with the direction Canadian internet is taking lately, but not surprised all our feedback fell on deaf ears.
I never checked the prices of Telus before this change, so I'm not sure but I'm fairly certain you used to be able to get 25 for $60 a month, it's now $68.

This is just the reality of over selling their service. Now that peoples' usage is scaling up the insufficiencies of the networks is showing itself. When they sold you unlimited they could only do that when the average usage was 0.001 mbps. Now that the average usage is 0.01 mbps they have to scale everything back. I have bad news for you if you think this is the end because you will be paying another $30 more in five years when the average usage is 0.1mbps.

cowofwar
Jul 30, 2002

by Athanatos

The Dark One posted:

Great move on Bell's part to use the same branding for both ADSL/VDSL and FTTH. No matter where you live and how lovely their offerings in that area are, they can use the sheen of fiber almost being in the name to make it sound good.
Everyone has clambered on to the fiber marketing bus. Whether they call it fibe, or hybrid-fiber it is generally bullshit. If it's not last mile fiber optics then it's not fiber. My water company can't claim that I can get 4,000L/s flow rates on my taps because there is a huge pipe somewhere upstream so I'm not sure why Rogers/Bell is allowed to claim that their lovely copper/coax last mile is fiber just because the node has a fiber optic uplink. Probably because their marketing is always careful to indicate that the advertised speed is the "maximum speed" - not sure why that is tolerated either. In no other industry is service defined as the maximum - it is defined as the minimum. Some factory doesn't care about your ability to deliver up to 2MW of power, it cares about whether you can deliver reliably the 100KW of power it requires for day to day operation.

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cowofwar
Jul 30, 2002

by Athanatos
Only way you're getting FTTH is if you buy in to a new development. It will never be routed to existing single occupancy dwellings aside by individuals by either the companies or the government.

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