For the last 3 or 4 years I’ve been an Acanac ADSL subscriber, today I defected to Cogeco. I’ve always hated the big providers in Canada, those being Bell, Rogers and Cogeco. You can’t escape them here. Even when subscribing to Acanac I was actually using Bell’s lines and technology, but for a discounted price and unlimited bandwidth. Over time their service slid, after a year it was horrible and from that day on it never got better.
I’ve tried numerous times via phone or e-mail to get a Bell tech out here to look at my line. It used to be fine so I’m guessing it’s just some weird connection that got moved or jostled loose when another customer was getting hooked up or the weather got stormy. I gave them the benefit of the doubt, both Bell and Acanac, but the two could not work well enough together to get the job done. Several times I waited all day thinking a Bell technician was on their way, finally after contacting them later I found out that they dropped my speed profile again (remotely) and marked the ticket as resolved. But was it?
The answer continued to be no. Despite the fact that I could get a pretty consistant download speed of 450k/sec and unlimitted bandwidth, the service was useless for both gaming and general browsing. I constantly dropped from games, despite a decent ping, and websites often failed to load on their first attempt, almost like a DNS issue, which became especially frustrating on sites that were heavily AJAX driven as individual actions would fail repeatedly. Not good, frustrating to say the least.
So why did I give up on them? Well, Diablo III pushed me over the edge. Their new servers were flaky enough and my own flaky connection seemed to make it especially difficult for me to play. That and I realized my Acanac bill had crept up to almost the same price as the 30bmit connection at Cogeco. So I decided I’d try the limit of 175gb/month at 30mbps (6x my current speed) and in the mean time I’ll drop my Acanac account to the lowest speed since that will retain my unlimited bandwidth if needed. Depending on how things go, I may just drop them.
This is a sad day, for the first time in my life I’ll be giving money over to Cogeco. I’ve not managed to avoid Bell or Roger but now Cogeco is getting their small slice from me. But why do I loathe them so much? First off, they are one of the major backers towards UBB, a battle which will never be over unless the CRTC is dissolved. Cogeco, Bell and Rogers are stifling the market place with their near monopolies and and their friends at the CRTC.
I’m sorry Acanac, I wanted to support you, and perhaps I will still continue to. But much like Vonage you failed me. Today is a sad day.
A seasoned Senior Solutions Architect with 18 years of experience in technology design and implementation. Renowned for innovative solutions and strategic insights, he excels in driving complex projects to success. Outside work, he is a passionate fisherman and fish keeper, specializing in planted tanks.