Internet Providers besides Bell and Rogers

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The T comm business, cellphones, cable and internet , is something politicians talk all the time, but actually do little about regardless who is in power. Canadians pay some of the highest prices in the world.

Imagine a fixed price for a year where the cost isn't really fixed, but the discount is. Rogers has me on a 1.5GB mbps deal where the rate is about $150 / month, but I have a $90/ m discount, so I pay net $60 / m + HST. IMO $60 / m for 1.5GB mbps is a pretty good deal, but the pricing methodology is a sham and a PITA.

My pricing agreement is up in 2 months and my cost has just gone up $10 / m because the retail price went up, but the $90 / m discount stayed the same. Is there any other line of business where a fixed price really isn't a fixed priced, just your discount is fixed? Only in Canadian T Comm I suspect.

Satellite and wireless aside, most people are really limited to some extent by who has run lines in front of your house. Teksavvy used to be able to provide a decent deal to save you money, but not anymore.
 
PrivatePilot said:
I've been with a few providers. Spent the last 5 years on bell fibre - as soon as they laid fibre in our neighbourhood I signed up and never looked back at cable ever again. I constanttly threw up in my mouth a little dealing with bell, but there's just no replacement for fibre for speed and reliability.

In typical Bell fashion however you had to play the retentions game every 6-12 months to maintain a sane pricing structure as otherwise the price bloated quickly. That always sucked.

When the fibre infrastructure in our neighborhood reached the 5 year requirement where it was mandated by the CRTC that competitors be allowed to use their fibre, I switched immediately to Primus on their gigabit fibre plan. Fixed price with no mystery increases every few months, and I actually like their hardware a lot more - just a simple ONT vs the garbage bloated "Home Hub" modem/router combo that Bell insists you use which stupidly has NO bridge mode for those who have their own router hardware. Primus included a router as well, but I opted to use my own prosumer router instead and handle the PPPoE authentication through it directly.

Every bit as rock solid and fast as Bell was.
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I will look at Primis too, thanks. What is ONT that you are referring to?
 
An ONT (optical network terminal) is the interface between the fibre and whatever you plan to hook it up to inside your house, ie a router.

The thing I like about the way Prius approaches things is that the ONT method lets you use your own hardware, whereas the Bell “everything built into one box and does much of it badly” sucks, but you have to use their ****** hardware.
 
PrivatePilot said:
An ONT (optical network terminal) is the interface between the fibre and whatever you plan to hook it up to inside your house, ie a router.

The thing I like about the way Prius approaches things is that the ONT method lets you use your own hardware, whereas the Bell “everything built into one box and does much of it badly” sucks, but you have to use their ****** hardware.
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Interesting. Thanks. My router has an sfp+ port so I could run Fibre into it if I bought the proper adapter. That's theoretically the fastest connection (although it may be blocked by isp) but not sure it's worth the effort and expense. At best I have 1Gbps inside house. If isp equipment can bridge, that makes it far easier to get back up if my router fails and should only add a tiny bit of latency and no speed penalty. The mikrotik is so solid and works well (it is happy running for years between reboots) but setup was very painful.
 
I was with Rogers years ago. Got tired of the annual retention calls required to keep the rate from being completely extortionate so I switched to Teksavvy. I was with them for a decade but this past winter they increased the rate by yet another $2-3/month without offering any improvements to the service so I went looking elsewhere. I ended up with Oxio for almost $20 less each month for 4x faster service. Time will tell how their customer service compares, but so far the connection is good and reliable.

FYI, Oxio makes a big deal about their smart home ready router with cloud management services but they use a standard cable modem. I just left the fancy router in the box and used my old faithful router that I know isn't sending "diagnostic" data back to the mothership.
 
GreyGhost said:
Interesting. Thanks. My router has an sfp+ port so I could run Fibre into it if I bought the proper adapter. That's theoretically the fastest connection (although it may be blocked by isp) but not sure it's worth the effort and expense. At best I have 1Gbps inside house. If isp equipment can bridge, that makes it far easier to get back up if my router fails and should only add a tiny bit of latency and no speed penalty. The mikrotik is so solid and works well (it is happy running for years between reboots) but setup was very painful.
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Yeah if you have an sfp port directly on your router, you’re laughing, you don’t even need the ONT. I did have to go through multiple layers of technical support at Primus before I found a guy who would give me the PPPOE credentials and the Vlan port ID I needed to get my router to handle the PPPOE login. The router that they include is a pre-configured set up that automatically handles all of that for a typical consumer, but I was happy to be able to exclude all of that and use my own hardware.

The stupid Bell Home hub crap (ONT/router combo) did not support bridge mode so it was always a pain in the ass – best you could do was turn off all of the Wi-Fi and thankfully Bell supported multiple PPPOE logins so my router was still able to do its thing without ending up in a double NAT situation, however every time the power went out the stupid thing would turn on it Wi-Fi again unnecessarily so I’d have to login and turn it off again.
 
KLR Junkie said:
and used my old faithful router that I know isn't sending "diagnostic" data back to the mothership.
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Indeed, this is one of the reasons I like using my own hardware as well, your ISP can’t log into your router whenever they damn well feel like it and mess with settings.

I did have to call into Primus technical support a few weeks ago for something completely bizarre (that’s another story) and the guy was very confused initially why he wasn’t able to access anything on my end despite seeing the connection online. To the guys credit he turned out to be extremely knowledgable and when I explained my set up he understood it immediately, and he said he didn’t blame me for not using the default hardware lol - my router is far superior to the TP Link Deco they include.
 
Just switched over to Primus today through Costco. I’ll see if they use the existing Bell infrastructure. We kept Bell through Covid, because Sue was working from home, and the reliability was 1,000 times better than the cable lines. Now we’re going to cut the price almost in half.
Did anyone notice that you couldn’t log onto the newer Bell modems to customize your setup? I ended up leaving the original one attached, as I’ve changed the ip address, ip @ ranges, passwords, stopped it from replying to pings etc on it. Couldn’t seem to find the login for the new one.
 
Baggsy said:
Just switched over to Primus today through Costco. I’ll see if they use the existing Bell infrastructure. We kept Bell through Covid, because Sue was working from home, and the reliability was 1,000 times better than the cable lines. Now we’re going to cut the price almost in half.
Did anyone notice that you couldn’t log onto the newer Bell modems to customize your setup? I ended up leaving the original one attached, as I’ve changed the ip address, ip @ ranges, passwords, stopped it from replying to pings etc on it. Couldn’t seem to find the login for the new one.
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Even teksavvy somewhat locks down their modems. You can't upgrade firmware on them (even with permission, buying/renting a new modem with current firmware is the only option) but otherwise yiu reasonably have control.
 
Freedom runs on the Rogers network, but after using it for a couple of months you begin to realize it's throttled/stepped on. I have speed drops/lost signals in areas that I previously didn't. The (big) cost decrease + (big) data increase mostly outweigh it.
 
I’m using TEKSAVVY up at the cottage, but Rogers here at home.

Majority of the options run off Rogers or Bell anyway so not like we have real competition.
 
mimico_polak said:
I’m using TEKSAVVY up at the cottage, but Rogers here at home.

Majority of the options run off Rogers or Bell anyway so not like we have real competition.
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I keep getting texts from Freedom about 5G home internet, but I'd assume I'd be looking at the same throttling issues I have with their cell service.
 
Baggsy said:
Just switched over to Primus today through Costco. I’ll see if they use the existing Bell infrastructure.
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Primus *is* Bell. It's a Bell off-brand. Same as Distributel which Bell acquired Primus through.

There's no real competition in fiber, not in almost all of Canada.
 
Shaman said:
Primus *is* Bell. It's a Bell off-brand. Same as Distributel which Bell acquired Primus through.

There's no real competition in fiber, not in almost all of Canada.
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It’s almost half the price of Bell.
For now.
 
Only took me a couple of hours to get this computer back onto the internet. Some of the hard connections no longer wanted to operate.
We'll see how long it takes to get the rest of the house up and running.
Will start the cancellation process with Bell tomorrow.
 
What I've found from trying various third party ISP's is that no matter how well-supported they are, there's nothing they can do (and can't even provide an ETA) when their upstream provider (Rogers or Bell) is the source of the problem. What's sad is that I tried to stay with Tek Savvy at one point, even during an outage that had gone on for over a week, but they were at the mercy of Rogers to fix and were given no ETA. Then coincidentally a Rogers rep came knocking and offered to have me up and running the same day for an introductory price less than what I was paying to TS. As much as I hated them for that, I had no choice but to switch because I needed it for work. As soon as my contract expired, I switched to Fido and then later to an RFD promotion with Carrytel. I had a couple of outages with them that were blamed on Rogers, but luckily they didn't last long. They stopped honouring the promotion by raising rates, and their 100 Mbps service was more than what I could get 2 Gbps service from Rogers, so it was kind of a no-brainer. Yes, it was a promotion, but I signed up during Black Friday, so there will be another promotion when my contract expires next Black Friday and I shouldn't need to negotiate much, if at all.
 
Bell doesn't make it super easy to cancel. You need to call the number, and cancellation isn't readily labelled in the early options. My concern now is that to get the shipping label to send them back their stuff, you need to put in an order number under the label Internet - Disconnect. Hopefully, they will not disconnect the Primus service that I just had connected. Rogers did that once, and I was not happy. This seems over-complicated.
 
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