Canada (as some of you know it, great white north) Internet.

[kirashi]

1 hour ago, RealBuizel10 said:

Exactly, If you can get the-telecom-who-must-not-be-named Fibre optic, its much better than shaw.

Im on a 2 year contract and cut my cable.

Problem is my parents are complaining that we have no TV. I am considering the-telecom-who-must-not-be-named Optik TV instead of Shaw. Can anyone tell me how good it is?

 

Um. Guess I should have clarified that the Canadian-telecom-who-shall-not-be-named is also out of the question. Not only do they charge for "data overages*", which Shaw does not currently do to us in our area, their provided Modem/Router combo is even worse! Our neighbor has this telecom, and the ISP provided modem/router drops wired connections as well as wireless, so adding their own router doesn't help much. They're switching over to Shaw within the next few weeks here.

 

I will give them that having Fibre to the neighborhood node is a wee bit better than Shaw's shared cable bandwidth, however, in our area the lines are so old we don't have the luxury of Fibre to the node, so it's basically DSL throughout the entire neighborhood. For others, the-ISP-who-shan't-be-named might be amazing, but not where we live, and we're literally 5 minutes away from a major city, and only 1.5 hours from Victoria, BC, where all our communication passes through anyway.

 

*data overage: a fee charged when users use more than their "alloted" [read: arbitrary] bandwidth for the sole purpose of making ISPs even more profitable. similar to being charged additional fees for running more than 20 Litres of water through your garden hose per month - except that in most places, you just pay a flat monthly waterbill anad are simply expected to not be an idiot when it comes to water conservation.

[stconquest]

Toronto - Rogers - no data cap after 10 years of that shit.

 

130 down (usually is between 140-150), 10 up - $75/mo.

[samiscool51]

you lucky Canadian, getting over 100MB's download

come to australia during the summer, it's over 40C during Christmas and the internet is $h1t

this is why i'm moveing there

[Wombo]

7 hours ago, RealBuizel10 said:

Exactly, If you can get the-telecom-who-must-not-be-named Fibre optic, its much better than shaw.

Im on a 2 year contract and cut my cable.

Problem is my parents are complaining that we have no TV. I am considering the-telecom-who-must-not-be-named Optik TV instead of Shaw. Can anyone tell me how good it is?

5 hours ago, kirashi said:

Um. Guess I should have clarified that the Canadian-telecom-who-shall-not-be-named is also out of the question. Not only do they charge for "data overages*", which Shaw does not currently do to us in our area, their provided Modem/Router combo is even worse! Our neighbor has this telecom, and the ISP provided modem/router drops wired connections as well as wireless, so adding their own router doesn't help much. They're switching over to Shaw within the next few weeks here.

 

I will give them that having Fibre to the neighborhood node is a wee bit better than Shaw's shared cable bandwidth, however, in our area the lines are so old we don't have the luxury of Fibre to the node, so it's basically DSL throughout the entire neighborhood. For others, the-ISP-who-shan't-be-named might be amazing, but not where we live, and we're literally 5 minutes away from a major city, and only 1.5 hours from Victoria, BC, where all our communication passes through anyway.

 

*data overage: a fee charged when users use more than their "alloted" [read: arbitrary] bandwidth for the sole purpose of making ISPs even more profitable. similar to being charged additional fees for running more than 20 Litres of water through your garden hose per month - except that in most places, you just pay a flat monthly waterbill anad are simply expected to not be an idiot when it comes to water conservation.

Despite being called "Optik" the services provided by Telus under that branding are not guaranteed to be transported over fibre optics and Telus will tell you that no such correlation is being implied despite the naming convention. Got to love marketing...

 

Telus infrastructure for residential (and even enterprise sadly) is mostly old copper telephone lines. While it is true these do give you a slightly higher degree of separation from other users they are also a lot more susceptible to issues caused by the legacy technologies used for transport over these lines, not to mention the fact the lines are extremely dated and are prone to physical issues themselves. Additionally, your traffic is almost guaranteed to be aggregated with others past what is called the HLU, so the separation doesn't go too far.

 

Cable technologies, or DOCSIS, have come a long way over the years. It is true the bandwidth is shared however the number of channels available on DOCSIS 3.1 systems makes this somewhat of a mute point. You're dealing with bandwidths in the tens of Gbps on a single multi channel bonding. Don't look for this being offered anytime soon, but DOCSIS 3.1 is boasting throughput of over 10Gbps to individual subscribers over short/medium distances.

 

As a bit of information I've gathered over the years, all of Shaw's cable nodes are FTTN, this is often called hybrid fibre/coax. Each node then has redundant fibre uplinks to a larger cable chassis that routes traffic over a larger fibre backbone, and ultimately to the internet. The individual coaxial cable runs themselves are not that long.

 

To go back to the OP's point about the offerings, if we want to compare Shaw to Telus, the two major ISP's in Western Canada, Telus can barely offer 150 to 15% of their users. Shaw is reporting the service is available on over 98% of their network, with the total number of nodes showing signs of saturation at 0.03%.

 

Enjoy

 

[vanished]

11 minutes ago, Wombo said:

... Shaw is reporting availability at 98%, ...

Hm, 0.02 * 365 days = 7.3 days per year with no service... I rip on them a lot for going down but even I know they're not that bad.  Maybe a combined total of 1 day per year, max.

[Wombo]

Just now, Ryan_Vickers said:

Hm, 0.02 * 365 days = 7.3 days per year with no service... I rip on them a lot for going down but even I know they're not that bad.  Maybe a combined total of 1 day per year, max.

Availability of 150 on their network, not reliability or up time. I'll update my post for more clarity.

[vanished]

Just now, Wombo said:

Availability of 150 on their network, not reliability or up time. I'll update my post for more clarity.

oh, yeah that's completely different.  I may have hugely misinterpreted that  

[TubsAlwaysWins]

On 8/26/2016 at 2:47 PM, RealBuizel10 said:

I live in western canada and its burning at the moment. 30 degrees today (86 f) and I live in a city where houses go over 2 million but you can get apartments easily called Vancouver.

 

I pay 80 dollars a month for this internet (shaw wideopen 150):

 

http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/5582865627

 

 

 

Holy Sh*t. I pay $60 a month for 10mb/s but in reality its more like 5 mb/s

[dalekphalm]

11 hours ago, TubsAlwaysWins said:

Holy Sh*t. I pay $60 a month for 10mb/s but in reality its more like 5 mb/s

That's.... awful.

[GR8-Ride]

I pay $115 CAD ($87 USD) per month for 250 Mbps down / 20 Mbps up, with no bandwidth caps in Ontario with Cogeco.   No complaints from my side....they've been an excellent ISP.

[TubsAlwaysWins]

On 8/30/2016 at 8:13 AM, dalekphalm said:

That's.... awful.

Its gotten better recently but ive still never hit 10

[RealBuizel10]

On 8/29/2016 at 4:35 PM, samiscool51 said:

you lucky Canadian, getting over 100MB's download

come to australia during the summer, it's over 40C during Christmas and the internet is $h1t

this is why i'm moveing there

its already fall in the northern hemisphere ill come next year

[RealBuizel10]

On 8/29/2016 at 8:03 PM, TubsAlwaysWins said:

Holy Sh*t. I pay $60 a month for 10mb/s but in reality its more like 5 mb/s

Canadian dollar is $h!t right now. Its only about 65 amurican dollars right now.