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Primus TalkBroadband (19.95 for free local calls and 300 minutes to Can and US, 911 available everywhere).

Yak Communications (1000 mins to can, us, china, hong kong, free local calls, for 19.95 USD + 31 set up fee + 1 year contract! BOOOO!)

Vonage Communications (500 mins to Can and US, every calling feature they have, but no 911 yet)

There are also offerings from other companies that don't cover all of Canada yet such as:

BabyTel

Sprint Canada

BabyTel is cheap, Sprint is 19.95 like the rest. Currently I am with Primus because they have both the best price and 911 service, no contract, and you don't have to buy some stupid piece of hardware.

I look forward to switching to Vonage as soon as they get 911, as their price is better, and all the reviews indicate that their quality of service is top notch.

Right, those rates really are nothing special.

Sprint Canada offers a long-distance plan with unlimited, flat-rate, any time-of-day calling throughout North America (including Hawaii and Alaska) for $19.95 per month, Canadian (that's about $15 US).

New Zealand long-distance resellers were offering $0.13 ($0.08 US) per minute from NZ to the US four years ago, and those calls crossed the Pacific with no statistical multiplexing at all -- just channelised, circuit-switched voice.

When people start offering flat-rate, North American calling for $5 per month, then perhaps this will be news. This story is just knee-jerk hysteria, risen from the noise floor of demonstrably poor regulation and an effectively closed local loop.

Right, those rates really are nothing special.

Sprint Canada offers a long-distance plan with unlimited, flat-rate, any time-of-day calling throughout North America (including Hawaii and Alaska) for $19.95 per month, Canadian (that's about $15 US).

New Zealand long-distance resellers were offering $0.13 ($0.08 US) per minute from NZ to the US four years ago, and those calls crossed the Pacific with no statistical multiplexing at all -- just channelised, circuit-switched voice.

When people start offering flat-rate, North American calling for $5 per month, then perhaps this will be news. This story is just knee-jerk hysteria, risen from the noise floor of demonstrably poor regulation and an effectively closed local loop.

Just spent half an hour trying (unsuccessfully) to persuade Mozilla not to reduce all the pages on a French government site to 4 point text (why would this be a feature for anyone unless your name is Stuart Little?).

BTW - a lot of the sites that won't work with Mozilla are in such a state due to retarded webmasters who do browser-checks. For whatever reason, Sprint Canada has decided that "Netscape 7 is not supported", whereas Netscape Communicator is. Wait - scratch that. I seem to be able to browse their entire site using Phoenix and Mozilla 1.2. Ok, so they've fixed themselves.

If you don't like the fact that a site doesn't work in a standards-compliant browser like Mozilla, complain to the webmaster not Slashdot.

There have been several good suggestions about how to test your T1, but you may have noted that some imply you'd be getting 5 T1s and testing them all so you know which one to keep, which is somewhat unrealistic.

Perhaps the obvious overlooked tidbit is that you're sharing this T1 with other users via a hub.... and it needs to be said that you're at far more risk of the other users siphoning off your bandwidth than you are of your ISP not providing it in the first place. To do any of the suggested tests, you'll want to be disconnecting your neighbours first.

I might suggest a bit of cautious thought here. We are one of those small ISPs, and naturally we buy bandwidth from the bigger ones. Recently, one of them tried to FUD us into buying T1s because another of them is financially insecure at the moment. We told them that we'd be happy to talk to them (and we do intend to deal with them), but don't bother trying to sell us by FUDing the competitor's service, just tell us about the merits of their own and end it there, thank you. We can fill in the blanks for ourselves. We tell everyone that, and I recommend you do the same. If the small guy swears he's not oversubscribing, do you have any reason do disbelieve him besides the FUD of a commissioned salesperson trying to meet his quota? Try asking for a reference or two. Besides, as has been pointed out, oversubscription is not inherently evil, as it's based on the fact that not all of the pipe is in use all of the time.... the same as telephone line pools. It can be done properly. If you're measuring your bandwidth in anything less than sustained Mbps, I'd suggest you won't notice if you're only able to utilize 90% of your 1/3 of the T1, as the difference here is probably less than if your neighbours both decided to run "Windows Update" on their PCs at the same time. One thing worth remembering is that people who are actually able to browse the Internet over a really BIG pipe tend to discover that a lot of the sites on the Internet just aren't that fast. If you really do notice, the logical conclusion is that you and your neighbours are oversubscribing the T1 already, so you really couldn't criticize the ISP for following the same practice, if he is.

The academic side to your question has good merit, and I believe has been answered. Honestly, in your situation the practical side is probably moot. If the local guy checks out with references and offers a good product at a good price, deal with him - give the little guy a break while he competes against the incumbent telcos, a position which is not for the faint of heart. At least he'll know your name when you call and you'll probably get through to the sysadmin if you need support, rather than having to deal with "Operator #17" who can't find your ticket number. If the local guy can't deliver, by all means go with the telco.

My $.02.

-brt

These discussions about american cable and internet access prices always shock me. In comparison to my country (Canada) the US has a much higher population density. And therefore, for technologies like DSL and cable which require more hardware per distance from the central office, it should be LESS expensive to deploy these in the US in comparison to Canada since on average, the american companies should get more subscribers (and revenue) per amount of hardware:

For example (In Canada, monthly costs:)
Cable TV (deluxe package): CDN$44.34
DSL (worst case): CDN$24.95
Phone Service (Sprint): CDN$19.95

Total: CDN$89.24 or US$55.93 for DSL, long distance and cable TV.

Now to me, US$200+ for all that stuff is a rip-off in the extreme. I honestly don't know how Americans have put up with prices being pumped up this high and not revolting. These prices are certainly more than inflated and you are well justtified in complaining.

Note (1): I pay abour CDN$30/month for internet access, but that's because I don't live in an area with broadband coverage, and my package includes dual-dialup multilink and a shell account.

Note (2): The deluxe packages for Canadian satellite TV are more in the CDN$40/month range.

Why don't you shut the fuck up? The Canadian Right can lick my hairy balls. You monopoly using, Ralph Klein loving cock sucker.

Fight the monopoly! Move your local phone service over to Sprint Canada ASAP!