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Look, if you or anyone else thinks they can offer better service than the current providers and still make a profit, be my guest. They don't have some sort of magic pixie dust that allows them to operate their businesses. Start your business and offer your superior service to a small area (wireless or whatever you choose - say to a suburb in Toronto). If your customers like what you are offering, chances are others will too. There is nothing preventing someone else entering the market - unless it is some stupid government regulation (which of course should be eliminated). BTW According to this there are 41 ISP's just in Edmonton. And not one of them does what you want? http://www.canadianisp.com/cgi-bin/ispsearch.cgi

that is far from "almost all". competition is generally alive and well, as the CLECs are required to lease out lines.

http://canadianisp.com/ has a rather extensive listing of the little guys.

http://www.canadianisp.com/ for a larger ISP listing.

There's more then just 3web available but considering how small a market canada is period compared to the US, I'm surprised that there's usually 4-5 companies in most large cities at times providing dsl and cable service. DSL is much easier to get because you can get a dry loop for nothing due to deregulation. Bell was the only monopoly for 50+ years.

The only way that will happen in the end is if the CRTC and other providers come to an agreement over the cable lines. Rogers isn't the only provider in Ontario, we have aurora(in crtc pending to be bought by rogers), Cogeco in some areas and such. But generally Rogers has paid the price to upgrade the lines over the last 15 years around here. Out east, and Quebec you have Rogers and other providers, out west you have Shaw and a couple of others.

Dude - www.canadianisp.com

I found my replacement for Bell there, 3Web (or CIA, same company) Cable (rogers reseller), 5Megs, 34$/m taxes incl...

Hope that helps!

If you are a Canadian and use an ISP that has a bandwidth cap, then you are using the wrong ISP. As both the phone companies and cable companies are legislated/required to resell their last-mile infrastructure to all ISPs, there is a huge choice for Canadians. I have a 5Mbps/1Mbps DSL connection, no caps, no port filtering, servers permitted.

In fact, I just did a quick search using http://canadianisp.com/ and there are over 60 ISPs who will sell me Internet access. Do NOT stick with the "incumbent" carriers (Rogers and Bell in my area). They offer the worst service, have caps (either explicit or hidden), filter ports, disallow servers and their customer service has been outsourced to Asia.

> Can anyone recommend some non-DSL, high speed (5+ MBPS), preferably low-cost ISPs in the London, Ontario area?

http://www.canadianisp.com/ lists several ISPs who claim to offer cable-based Internet including two with no bandwidth caps. Execulink is a SW ON based reseller. (Their HQ is just up the 401 from you in Burgessville.) Although I have no personal experience with them, I know several people in the K-W area who love their DSL service.

And like you, I just gave Bell the boot (30-days notice) and will be switching to Teksavvy DSL.

This site will help you out, pretty good list
http://www.canadianisp.com/

No caps on my service it's unlimited, they have a bandwidth activity tracker http://www.bell.ca/myinternet you can see your combined usage for each month. My last tree months were all over 110GB & as it states when I log into that page my account is unlimited bandwidth usage.

I consistently get 450kB/s to 550kB/s speeds when downloading via utorrent, not bad for a 5MB service really.

Here's the part in the user agreement dealing with caps

The Sympatico High Speed Internet service includes: # 1. a high speed Internet connection; 2. depending on the particular Service offering available to and selected by you: (A) unlimited bandwidth usage; or (B) bandwidth usage with a limit on the combined download (from the Internet to you) and upload (from you to the Internet) bandwidth activity. In the case of (B), this limit will be identified to you prior to placing an order with Your Service Provider. An additional charge will apply for bandwidth activity that exceeds this limit.

If you want to compare providers look here http://www.canadianisp.com/

If I did have to switch I'd likely go with http://www.montreal-dsl.com/index.php

You said it - city. And I mean 'city' by regular definitions (say, more than 200,000 citizens), not weird North American ('any conurbation of 2 or more houses'). Look at this page, and discover that the large majority of conurbations in this province have 1 or 2 ISPs only.

Traffic shaping is done on local networks by businesses, but it is currently not done by ISPs

Except that user's don't have choices in ISPs. There are usually only 2: the local telecom and the local cable company.

I've heard from a few people that 3web's support sucks. Myself, I've been considering a switch from Bell to TekSavvy.

Anyone in Canada looking to switch ISPs should check out http://www.canadianisp.com/. They have a list of ISPs in most major cities (82 for me in Toronto) complete with customer reviews.

Why would it cost 10x more? Where did you get that number? Why does it cost more in the US than Canada for twice the bandwidth with no caps? I don't think cost is an issue. It's more politics and our telecom industry doing the Ma Bell skit over, and over, and over, again.

Don't believe me, try this link:
http://www.canadianisp.com/cgi-bin/ispsearch.cgi?i spid=188&sp=PQ&serv_type=cable&busper=res&maxprc=1 00&city=Qu%E9bec%20City&SUBMIT=showdetail

Of course, there are better deals I'm sure, but that's what you get for 5 minutes of research.

The moral of the story is simply that of "good" business practices. The telecom industry keeps development costs down, our bandwidth shitty, and profits up. I'd do the regular 1, 2, 3 list with PROFIT! at the end but I think this worked just fine.

You can use any of these DSL providers. Vote with your dollars people.

See here. I bet there are a whole bunch of good, small ISPs where you are. I am with a small ISP and they are a refreshment after Rogers (local cable, 40% packet loss at peak times) and Bell. No phoney "unlimited" accounts, all ports open, servers allowed, static IPs available, no scripted $7/hr bots on the phones, SLAs available...

AFAIK, all DSL traffic in Ontario (and more) ends up going through Bell, but if you use a different DSL ISP, by then it's just considered traffic from another ISP, and your BitTorrent traffic won't be throttled.

Currently, I use MyCybernet.net. No worries, hassle-free, and it's always up. I don't work for them, I'm just a very happy customer.

Many people in Canada (and worse, outside Canada) assume that there is nothing else but Bell or Rogers. It's pretty sad. Do some due-diligence and you'll find that there are many other options out there.

I used to subscribe to Rogers. Never again will I pay the bastards a cent.

At first I was happily subscribed to Shaw@Home cable internet service. Uptime was good and I achieved 4.0Mb off of peak hours. I was paying $40\mo

Then Rogers bought Shaw and took over their territory. They called their new service "Rogers@Home Unlimited High Speed Internet". They reduced my service to 1.5Mb. They increased tech support hold times from 5 minutes to 45 or more. The service was so unstable that I was unable to stream an 11khz mono shoutcast UDP signal to one person (about 3Kb\s). They didn't lower their rates even though I was recieving a fraction of the service Shaw offered.

To top it all off, they called me 2 years ago, saying that I was downloading too much and was reducing the enjoyment of other Rogers internet subscribers. I dug up some pamphlets and the original documentation they provided me which clearly stated "unlimited internet access", but the CSR told me that "unlimited" means I can be connected at all times, not downloading unlimited amounts (aka "limited" in my dictionary). I'll omit my unpleasant response to this. I then told them that their equipment was inadequate for my area, which was the real cause of the lack of service. They seemed to think otherwise. I told Rogers to get stuffed.

Rogers is THE single most heartless, money grubbing, bait-and-switch gyp joint you can possibly surrender your earnings to. If you want a decent ISP with no caps and Usenet access, I highly recommend researching www.canadianisp.com to find one of the highly competetive ma and pa ADSL ISP's (there are over 100 in Toronto alone). Or do what I did and get the best one in the Toronto area - Cybernet (though they cap Usenet to 300MB/day).

There is NO REASON to subscribe to Rogers internet service. Their support is notoriously terrible, residential areas per shared hub are huge which makes throughput slow as molasses every evening, the price is relatively high, and you are forced to rent a modem from them monthly. Give your money to hard working independent ISPs who will work their butts off to make you happy. Buy your own modem (about $60) and save yourself $10\month for the same max speeds (3.0Mb slowest) with no slowdown at peak times. All these statements are corroborated by residential internet users like you at www.canadianisp.com

P.s., my girlfriend just told me that Rogers has reduced her evenings and weekends "unlimited" cellular times from 6pm-6am to 9pm-6am, and it will only cost her 100% of her previous price! What a deal!

I used to subscribe to Rogers. Never again will I pay the bastards a cent.

At first I was happily subscribed to Shaw@Home cable internet service. Uptime was good and I achieved 4.0Mb off of peak hours. I was paying $40\mo

Then Rogers bought Shaw and took over their territory. They called their new service "Rogers@Home Unlimited High Speed Internet". They reduced my service to 1.5Mb. They increased tech support hold times from 5 minutes to 45 or more. The service was so unstable that I was unable to stream an 11khz mono shoutcast UDP signal to one person (about 3Kb\s). They didn't lower their rates even though I was recieving a fraction of the service Shaw offered.

To top it all off, they called me 2 years ago, saying that I was downloading too much and was reducing the enjoyment of other Rogers internet subscribers. I dug up some pamphlets and the original documentation they provided me which clearly stated "unlimited internet access", but the CSR told me that "unlimited" means I can be connected at all times, not downloading unlimited amounts (aka "limited" in my dictionary). I'll omit my unpleasant response to this. I then told them that their equipment was inadequate for my area, which was the real cause of the lack of service. They seemed to think otherwise. I told Rogers to get stuffed.

Rogers is THE single most heartless, money grubbing, bait-and-switch gyp joint you can possibly surrender your earnings to. If you want a decent ISP with no caps and Usenet access, I highly recommend researching www.canadianisp.com to find one of the highly competetive ma and pa ADSL ISP's (there are over 100 in Toronto alone). Or do what I did and get the best one in the Toronto area - Cybernet (though they cap Usenet to 300MB/day).

There is NO REASON to subscribe to Rogers internet service. Their support is notoriously terrible, residential areas per shared hub are huge which makes throughput slow as molasses every evening, the price is relatively high, and you are forced to rent a modem from them monthly. Give your money to hard working independent ISPs who will work their butts off to make you happy. Buy your own modem (about $60) and save yourself $10\month for the same max speeds (3.0Mb slowest) with no slowdown at peak times. All these statements are corroborated by residential internet users like you at www.canadianisp.com

P.s., my girlfriend just told me that Rogers has reduced her evenings and weekends "unlimited" cellular times from 6pm-6am to 9pm-6am, and it will only cost her 100% of her previous price! What a deal!

If you were to use DSL, you would have much more choices and it might be cheaper. http://www.canadianisp.com/

But the rural spread of our population makes market penetration quite difficult

You can get DSL even in a place like Moosonee, in northern Ontario. This is a small town of 2500 souls near James Bay, surrounded by thousands of km of forest and shrubs and not much else.

You can also get DSL in places like Magnetawan (population 1300). Grab an atlas, look up a few tiny places in rural Ontario, and look them up yourself at http://canadianisp.com/ for yourself.

I just switched from Shaw in BC, but not to Telus. I switched to a medium-sized DSL ISP called Uniserve, and have had few problems.

I had them before, for the calendar year 2003, and was favorably disposed toward them. Their business accounts are the same price as their residential, they offer static IPs, and don't really pay attention to usage (and don't relly need to). The residential service is fairly heavily port-blocked, but the business service, at the same price, takes care of that for those who opt in - not a bad policy.

Yes, Telus does provide the pair, but Uniserve provides the important part - the network. Once I got hooked up, Telus never bothered me again.

And you don't have to put up with Telus' crappy DHCP-assigned DNS servers, routers or their transparent HTTP proxy redirection (which gives me the willies).

I had to go with Shaw after I moved because I was waiting for a DSL port to open up. Shaw was better than Telus, for certain, but not Uniserve.

There are plenty of other Canadian ISPs out there, too. do your own research.

This just reinforces my opinion that only smaller ISP's can actually provide net access worth squat. Thank God for regulation. I can't wait to see broadband wireless blow some fat chunks out of telecom monopolies.

I used canadianisp.com in the past when shopping around for a new ISP.

I gotta learn how to post links, sorry, that article comparing Canadian VOIP providers and packages is located again at:

http://www.canadianisp.com/cgi-bin/forums/ikonboar d.cgi?act=ST&f=22&t=1796

most if not all DSL providers here in ontario offer either 3.0mbps or 4.0mbps down and 400-800kbps up. for a range of $35ish-$70ish canadian if you own a modem. rogers offers there HS and HS extreme 3000/384 and 5000/800 respectively, for $45 the later requires a one time $80 fee to buy a docsis 2.0 modem but i the case of my significant others area are really sucking at upgrading their equipment to support their new docsis 2.0 stuff and the speed is really bad. plus 10-20% packet loss. yes rogers sucks.

then you probably have cheap enough DSL. There are 66 DSL providers, according to Canadian ISP. I don't know how much cheaper than $20 CDN (that's about $15 USD) you can expect. You can expect to pay $30 CDN for higher-than-average speeds (1700kb/s down, 300kb/s up), and/or no caps. Let's see power line internet beat that.

Would somebody please start a new fully independant ISP (thats Independant Service Provider) here sometime? You will make a fortune!!!

There are plenty of small, good ISPs throughout the country, especially in the bigger cities. Lots of them offer extra features too, such as static IP and unlimited bandwidth. For example, I use a small company called CUIC, and I get unlimited bandwidth and a static IP for less than a standard Bell service (and MUCH better customer service). There are plenty of others out there.

I highly recommend you check out CanadianISP for a very thorough listing of alternative ISPs. They're kind of a watchdog site, and they include complete pricing listings and user satisfaction ratings; very informative.

Worth taking a look. Good luck!

"Telecom Italia upgraded, once agian, to ADSL in 2000. And, once agian, they fucked it up. They implemented ADSL using PPPoE. If you have not used PPPoE, your modem establishes a connection using a username/password. ISPs do this so they can monitor how much bandwidth you use."

I have to use PPPoE. My modem doesn't do anything with PPPoE - it syncs up with the DSLAM and then my router (or in its absence, desktop computer) establishes the PPPoE connection.

Personally I think PPPoE is a good thing. It gives me a choice of ISPs for a reasonable price. Without PPPoE, I would probably be forced to use my telcos inferior service. My ISP actually offers non-PPPoE DSL access, but it is almost twice the price and would take three weeks longer to set up. Oh, and I have a static IP address with my PPPoE connection. PPPoE allows me to chose from hundreds of ISPs, and be online very quickly.

Finally, PPPoE has nothing to do with monitoring bandwitdth consumption, although it does apparently make it easier via my ISPs Radius server. However, the local cable company has been planning to introduce bandwidth quotas (often miss-called "caps") for some time. They are DHCP based.

instead of the CRTC website. That's where I've been reading about the specifics of Canada's policies on forcing telephone companies to share their lines. As the parent says in another post, cable high speed access is widespread, but there isn't a lot of choice (usually only a couple cable providers even in large urban areas). Thanks to the policies in Ontario (and also thanks to the fact that I live in Toronto), I have lots of choice when it comes to DSL providers. If you head over to Canadian ISP, you can get an idea of what sort of providers are in what areas. In Toronto, there are 51 DSL providers listed, thanks to regulations, but only 1 cable provider (there are actually at least two cable providers that I can think of, so the website isn't completely reliable). I went with DSL because it's cheaper.

Because there IS a monopoly. Maybe it's not Bell's fault for being a monopoly (I'm not sure of the history here), but you either force them to "subsidize" the competition, or else the consumer pays through the nose.

Here in Ontario, Bell would have used its power to take losses on DSL provision, setting the price below cost, in order to have a monopoly in that area. Thanks to what looks like actions of the Canadian Association of Internet Providers (just did a quick google search here, wasn't certain of the background), I have a choice for DSL in Toronto. I have very little choice when it comes to cable providers, as they're not regulated. Take a quick trip to www.canadianisp.com, and check out the number of DSL and cable providers in Toronto. 51 DSL providers, 1 cable provider. Which do you think is better for consumer?

In Canada, we've had bandwidth caps (much lower, I might add) for some time now.

That's funny, because my searches at some sites seem to indicate otherwise; that there are plenty of DSL ISPs in areas such as Toronto offering UNCAPPED DSL for around $50 per month. Oh yes I've heard of the crappy ISPs that offer a far more restrictive service for the same or a higher price. And they're the Canadian equivalent of NTL.

I'd rather pay another 5 bucks just to get uncapped Internet from another company. (See here)

Then again, I can't get any DSL access until Bell gets off its fat behind and install some damn equipment.

As for another respondant saying it's been like that for two years, I was a Sympatico user when they indroduced the 5GB limit 4 months(not two years) ago. I still am now, but in the process of switching to others, as I don't think paying 45$ CAN/month for 5 GB is anything remotely acceptable(Ok, I lived with it for 4 months already, but that's just the inescapable power of inertia at work).

Now, this is only the case in the more heavily populated areas in Canada. As you get further out, first DSL disappears, then Cable. This is due to the fact that DSL is apparently difficult to send over long distances.

However, where it really gets interesting, is when you hear about how Bell used to be the telephone monopoly in Canada, and Rogers used to be the (Cable) Television monopoly. Now, Bell sells Satellite Television, and there have been rumors about Rogers selling Telephone service in the future!

All the rules have changed!

It's not as bad in Canada, but in Ontario and Quebec, Bell, Videotron and Rogers Cable are starting to impose download/upload caps (combined) at ridiculously low levels of 5 Gb per month.

Fortunately, there is a wide variety of alternative DSL ISP's. Most of them can be found at:

canadianisp.com

You can search by region, price, and service type, and each ISP's details (per dial-up, DSL or both) are listed in a table with such information as low-end price, high-end price, upload caps, download caps, allows usenet, webservers, or webspace.