What the hell! I can’t download any tunes, stream music or even surf the web at a reasonable rate. It took over 4 hours to get the 4 or 5 sets of ‘critical updates’ the other night after formatting this thing… That was way out by the Kelowna airport, about a mile from the UBC Okanagan campus. Now I’m at the Okanagan College dorms, right in the heart of Kelowna and It’s nearly impossible to use the web for anything other than e-mail and other text stuff, like HTMF and reading the news. Seriously, HTMF took over 20 seconds to load the front page… SHAW says that the problem is with college students running P2P services and they don’t expect things to get any better in the near future. Wouldn’t a packet_shaper or whatever fix that? Filter traffic moving through known P2P ports? I don’t very much understand how TCP/IP stuff works, or how things get from A to B, and yadda yadda, but I’m almost certain that Citytel implemented some sort of shaper device which fixed the big P2P overload we experienced about a year ago.
WTF?! Shaw just doesn’t seem to care at all, and I don’t believe Telus DSL is available on campus… Still, people in residential areas a mile away shouldn’t need to suffer because 1000 Atto McCanick’s are downloading porn on Limewire.
Shaw’s been perfect here for me since I’ve had it. I think I’ve had maybe 10 minutes total downtime in the 10 months that I’ve had it, and I’ve never had any extended outages like back in Rupert. Speed has never been an issue for me either, despite living in an area that is quite residental and full of students (I live close to SFU). No complaints at all, except that I know the price of my internet is going up for next month, as my 3 free months and 6 months at $10 is now over.
I’ve used shaw once in Prince George, and it was pretty pathetic. Telus has decent speeds, but you only get 1 gig upload, and 3 gig download/ month before you start paying extra. So if you like bit torrent, you better not get telus. Citytel is good for that one reason. We can download until our hearts are content, and then download some more… all for one flat monthly fee. I never had a problem with the full 2.2 meg dsl… Since I’ve moved outta the rents house, I’ve been using the new 4 meg standard dsl modem. It usually works and I can get around 226kb/s downloads, but sometimes it doesnt like my USR router, and the router needs rebooting (something to do with the ip lease time). It doesnt happen as often after I flashed the router with the the new firmware, but if the ports sit idle for a while, it disconnects… I know this isnt citytels problem… well maybe it is citytels problem, but im pretty sure its just a compatability problem with between the 8082 USR router and the dsl modem.
I’ve had all three before, Telus and Shaw in Calgary, Shaw in Kelowna and Vernon, Shaw in Winnipeg and on a simular note… Bell in Toronto.
Telus ADSL = great, until you have to get a hold of someone. Their d/l and u/l varies greatly, simply because their c/o’s are spaced irregularily throughout residential communities. Their wait times for customer service suck. And many a time I had to sit and wait for the modem to connect.
Shaw - I was one of the first residential customers to get one of the shiny cable modems back in '96 (or was it '97?). Big, white Motorola modem. Their service was super… until more and more people started using it. I went from 250kbps down to sub 100s. And then when P2P hit, the download / upload limits hit.
I moved around a couple of times in Calgary, and never got more than 150 in any place I had Shaw.
Citytel - fastest speeds so far. Only hiccups when Telus fiddles with the uplink, or DNS goes haywire for a few minutes. But that’s why I have in-house DNS.
[quote=“jleaman”]I have the shaw hi extream connection at home and love it… a nice steady 595k Download…
any Shaw conection is way better than telus.[/quote]
Wanna bet some money on that, Jason?
Good to see that while I was out of town, Shaw hasn’t bothered to fix this problem… It’s always nice when it takes 15 minutes to pay a VISA bill online, or 5 hours to download Rag Doll Kung Foo, especially when credit card numbers and encrypted sessions are hanging and you don’t know if clicking back, or clicking submit twice is something you really want to try… This is so pathetic of Shaw. Students and residents in this area shouldn’t need to pay this much for a service they can’t use.
RDKF just hit 3.2KB/s says STEAM… That’s only 181 minutes left for what should be a 10 minute download. If Mel had a phone in this joint, I’d be using dial-up through Telus, no question.
sitting beside my new P2P radio c/w 30" radome, waiting for the weekend. Weather permitting we connect the E10 thursday, we put up the tower & AP yesterday… 2 way 10MB at home (i need my own dedicated link for ‘system monitoring’ ) can’t wait…
[quote=“jleaman”]I have the shaw hi extream connection at home and love it… a nice steady 595k Download…
any Shaw conection is way better than telus.[/quote]
Wanna bet some money on that, Jason?
Good to see that while I was out of town, Shaw hasn’t bothered to fix this problem… It’s always nice when it takes 15 minutes to pay a VISA bill online, or 5 hours to download Rag Doll Kung Foo, especially when credit card numbers and encrypted sessions are hanging and you don’t know if clicking back, or clicking submit twice is something you really want to try… This is so pathetic of Shaw. Students and residents in this area shouldn’t need to pay this much for a service they can’t use.
RDKF just hit 3.2KB/s says STEAM… That’s only 181 minutes left for what should be a 10 minute download. If Mel had a phone in this joint, I’d be using dial-up through Telus, no question.[/quote]
Well, you had no complaints about shaw when you were stayin at my house The problem is shaw’s failure to plan for the new students at UBC, they do need to implement traffic shaping or bring in another line. I have no problems getting 300KB+ downloads from glenmore though… and im just in behind UBC so I must just be on a different circuit
I downloaded some shit from the old work place, who has the full dsl business line. I think fastest I’ve ever seen from there was 780kb/s. Is the full 7 megabit speeds? Its right across from citytel, so there was pretty much no line to travel before hitting the broadband.
Sitting in an 8x8 hut on the top of Murray Ridge about 5:15 tonight, tested new cct. Downloaded Firefox & Firefox beta so fast I thought it must already be downloaded or something. So one of the guys mentioned a 170MB game download and we checked it out. Started downloading at over 1800KB and slowed all the way down to a little over 1600KB.
Holy shit. www.speakeasy.com/speedtest registered 9.4 Mbps… but only 2.6 up
) can’t wait…
The problem is shaw’s failure to plan for the new students at UBC, they do need to implement traffic shaping or bring in another line. I have no problems getting 300KB+ downloads from glenmore though… and im just in behind UBC so I must just be on a different circuit 
