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 Review by Frozty2k 
UPDATED: 1.8 years ago
member for 7.6 years, 423 visits, last login: 1 year ago
 Oakville,ON
 $64 per month
 about 2 days
 "Reliability"
 "Bitcaps, Congestion, Price"
 "Service/Reliability was very good but bit-caps are not felxable."
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection Reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
(ratings above consensus)
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I had Cogeco for over 8 years at 3 locations in the GTA. Over the years reliability has come way up to a point where I almost cannot remember being offline at my last location (except for power outages). All three of my locations were in new developments but I found that speed was really a variable in all of them. I’ve been on the standard and pro packages and never gotten the full advertised speeds. The last location I actually never had more than 4meg on the standard 10meg package. It seems that on the forums it’s hit or miss on whether you can get close to the full speed or not.
I rarely needed to call tech support recently because of the high reliability, the few times I did call I noticed that wait times were much improved but the experience itself was still long/more difficult than it should be.
A few months ago Cogeco started to enforce the bit-caps after them being softcaps for years. The situation itself was handled extremely poorly in my view. There was no notice of the enforcement in any way and for many people no warnings. I myself did get warnings but the fact that you go from warning/cut off so quickly I never saw it in time (never used my email so rarely checked it). The general response was that the caps have been in the TOS for a long time and they can do whatever they want. Eventually the reasoning behind the enforcement has been to ‘protect’ other people from heavy users. This doesn’t make any sense as when you called in from getting cut off you were told the only thing you can do is upgrade your package. So once you pay more monthly it’s all ok, no longer an issue if you ‘ruin’ the experience for the low paying customers.
In the end I had to switch ISP’s as the bit-cap is just not high enough for me and the only other options are to spend a lot more for a faster connection where I would get no speed benefits anyways. When other ISP’s offer unlited for $40 and cogeco charges $190, something is wrong.
As a final note I found after switching that it can’t be denied that Cogeco has been throttling torrents and probably other p2p applications. The numbers don’t lie, Cogeco actively throttles or some part of their system conveniently cannot handle p2p connections properly.
Overall for someone who doesn’t make great use of their connection Cogeco is a good alternative to the better priced ISP’s if you don’t have any other choice.
Followup comments:  
Annon_DK
@cgocable.net
| Bitcaps Warnings are sent to your primary email address before they suspend you.
They also have a grace period of around 5-10GB of space above the 60GB before they start reacting. I've never seen anyone suspended for small amounts over the cap.
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| TDLBrian
join:2008-03-06
| bitcaps.. I've been suspended 3 times (yes all my fault from when I used to p2p sharing) but only ONCE was I ever sent an email warning me that my service was going to be cut off. I received no leniency with my bitcap. It was instant service stoppage. Overall I'd have to say the Tech support has a 50% average. In my experience it all falls onto who answers the phone meaning I've found that approx. 50% of the time they really do not know and /or rather not find out exactly what the problem is. They tend to believe it's something 'you' the customer has done something wrong and messed up your own pc. Yes, I agree a lot probably do that but we all don't and shouldn't be treated like morons. This is all of course just my opinion.. and would still recommend them for service as they rarely have down time and when they do it's usually a power outage. Gee I rambled on.. | |
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