Expansion project

Tuesday, I had the pretty much regular 5 Mb download, 800 kb upload internet service. It worked just fine and served me for quite some time. Speedtest.net rates it as you can see on the left.

Then I read that Teksavvy will be changing their pricing and adding new service options. The most popular services will be getting a little more expensive, but inexplicably, their fastest offerings will be dropping in price. The gears in my head started turning, and I made a call.

Wednesday, after the tech left, things are a bit faster. Of course this came at a cost. My monthly charge will increase from $42 to $63. It’s not an insignificant change, but it’s worth it to me.

I even signed up for a cloud based backup service. I’ve done this before, but eventually dropped it because they’re slow, and the required bandwidth was always an issue. The speed isn’t so much an issue any more. The upload time for my 600-odd GB of data was estimated at 3.2 months with my old service. The current estimate is 11.4 days. But given my 300 GB monthly bandwidth allowance, I can’t shoot the moon and let it finish in 11.4 days. This is where Teksavvy’s other announcement will help me. Most of their 300 GB plans will, as of February 2, offer a window from 2 am to 8 am everyday during which all data transfers will not count toward one’s monthly bandwidth allowance. So I can set my backup program to function between those times and the backup transfers will not impact my bandwidth allowance at all. I’ll still get all my data onto their servers in about a month.

I saw another one of those Bell Fibe ads and I did some checking. The only 25 mb/7 mb service Bell offers is the fastest Fibe plan … so that’s what I have since Teksavvy buys bandwidth from Bell for their DSL service. When Bell sells it, they charge $60 per month, but they offer only 100 GB of bandwidth. I get three times as much for $13 more. And I don’t have land-line telephone service so I pay an extra $10 for a dry loop, but Bell would charge extra for this as well so the price would be nearly the same.

Teksavvy is smart in not mentioning Bell’s Fibe service. I suspect that they’re not allowed to do so, but that’s a very good thing. Bell doesn’t call it a fibre-optic connection to your home, because it’s not. It’s a fibre optic connection to the distribution point in your neighbourhood. That may very well make it better than regular ADSL, but it’s not FTTH and they can’t say that it is. What Bell has decided to do is choose a name that sounds very similar, and have the actors in the ads say that it’s fast because it’s fibre optic. While true, as far as it goes, they know damned well that their strategy leads the potential client to make the wrong conclusion. It bothers me, and had Teksavvy tried the same advertising tom-foolery, I would have skipped the service without even looking at the details. I can’t stomach that sort of advertising and I won’t buy into it.

The only fly in the ointment is that some of the money I pay to Teksavvy does ultimately go to Bell, but at least it’s less than if I got the service directly from them, and I get the exact same service for less.

I’m not saying the fibre component of the service has no effect, but all Internet service involve fibre optic connections at some point. The difference in this one is that it comes much closer to my home than the other offerings in the Canadian market. I do believe that it makes a difference because as you can see above, my former 5 mb/0.8 mb server topped out at 4.4 mb/0.66 mb as often happens with DSL service. With the fibre carrying the data to the distribution point in front of the building next to mine, I get slightly higher than the maximum speeds I am promised. That’s certainly never been the case, in my experience!

Colour me very pleased so far.