Review by urbanriot - Location: St Catharines, ON, Canada
- Cost: $129 per month (36 month contract)
NEVER goes down, binary newsgroup support, amazing speeds, and local support. Expensive, personnel issues, allegedly slower in dense areas like apartment buildings. Excellent ISP for web browsing, emailing, gaming, speed; Expensive for unlimited internet.
| Pre Sales information: Install Co-ordination: Connection Reliability: Tech Support: Services: Value for money:
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I've been using Cogeco's service since before their name was attached, for maybe 15 years (I've lost track), and I've typically had a decent experience all throughout the Niagara Peninsula. The following encompasses my most recent four years with their service:
Cogeco's primary complaint from younger internet users:
- a moderate bandwidth allowance for residential accounts that charges people for overages when they could simply provide a web notification when a user is near.
Cogeco has many positive points:
- excellent torrent downloading speeds, always hitting my cap on properly seeded torrents. Cogeco employees have stated they're throttling P2P / torrent uploads, but I'm still able to obtain decent speeds and maintain ratios 2:1 ratios.
- extremely low gaming latancy with fast pings, some servers in NY and Toronto pinging as low as 7 - 12ms, faster than everyone else in the server.
- Highwinds newsgroup support with at least 30 day retention, which most ISP's are no longer offering, with support for many popular binary groups.
- local knowledgeable tech support that mostly speak a clear and understandable English who are available 24/7.
- some highly motivated, dedicated and skilled on-site techs (and a few that are not so much)
- I experience minimal internet downtime, I believe none in years; outages are extremely rare in the city
Cogeco's negative points:
- they hide the real prices of their packages online so most people are suckered into paying more than they expected
- a few years back, a number of profit making changes have been made to Cogeco which seriously disenfranchised them from their loyal and long term customer base
- inflexibility in scheduling on-site support calls: if you tell them you can only get out of work at a certain time, too bad, it's an 'all day' possibility. This frustrates so many people.
- a few on-site and contracted techs who aren't so skilled (rare but it happens)
- often the phone support personnel are not aware of nodal issues that they should be aware of, to better help customers often which result in.
- some phone support personnel have limited skills and a high degree of arrogance, so when encountering people with considerably more knowledge they foolishly provide bad advice with a bad attitude portraying themselves as experts and they don't engage in thorough enough technical support.
- phone support do not sufficiently provide detailed information when situations are escalated and they don't call you back as they tell you they will. And then they don't call you back the second time they tell you they will. Basically, expect that if someone at Cogeco tells you they'll call you back... they're lying to you.
- an inability to repair or diagnose issues that clearly exist outside your home and don't require service calls
- they don't appropriately alert users that they'll be nailed with overage charges before it happens. An email to an account that's never checked is not enough.
- they accidentally cancel accounts and you have to recreate a new one for no good reason.
member for 19.4 years, 8599 visits, last login: 1 day ago
updated 8.3 years ago
DrDog join:2006-07-28 Fort Erie, ON |
DrDog
Member
2007-Sep-24 7:13 am
on site techshave you had someone around other than me? I don't try and miss calls. If you are booked and in my lineup, you will get looked at | |
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Re: on site techsI'd actually written the above long before you came out; previously I'd had horrible experiences with calls and scheduling. I had to leave for a family emergency for 10 mins once, and while I was on my way back, the guy couldn't wait when I was 2 mins away. The Cogeco representative told me, "Sorry, he's in a rush and can't wait." And I'm thinking, "what rush, if I wasn't there, he would have been working on my problem not rushing wherever he had to rush to."
I'll re-read and correct when I get home tonight, I'd hastily edited it to include my recent frustrations with the newly enforced bitcap so it might have some old review. | |
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| urbanriot |
to DrDog
said by DrDog:have you had someone around other than me? I don't try and miss calls. If you are booked and in my lineup, you will get looked at Updated my review. No, you're one of Cogeco's best assets and it definitely wasn't directed at you. Unfortunately, I went through a few other people before you were able to fix things up and I might have kept my digital cable TV if the other guy was able to fix the picture dropouts last year. | |
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Gixxer join:2008-08-27 St Catharines, ON |
Gixxer
Member
2009-Dec-8 9:42 pm
100 Days?Where are you getting 100 days retention? At MOST it's 30 days -- let me guess, just like the whole throttling dilemma somehow you're also getting 70 extra day retention? | |
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Re: 100 Days?I don't know what that means but I'm pulling in posts up to 100 days, and people on the Cogeco forum have stated the same, some said 120+. I'm only going by experience and what everyone else is saying... if you feel otherwise, start a thread and we can get some hard info. | |
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| | Gixxer join:2008-08-27 St Catharines, ON |
Gixxer
Member
2009-Dec-8 10:25 pm
Re: 100 Days?I did actually, you can find it here. » Cogeco's Binary RetentionSomeone claims that they were able to get a file from the x264 binary group once 300 days old but I find that highly unlikely. Also considering that he didn't further elaborate he probably wasn't able to reproduce this miracle. I've been testing for an hour or so every day and all files older then 30 days seem to fail. | |
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Gixxer |
Gixxer
Member
2009-Dec-9 8:37 pm
Hard DataSo are we gonna get some hard data or what buddy? | |
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Re: Hard DataYea, I was sincerely searching for something I wanted to download that was between 75 to 100 days old that wasn't in some obscure group but I couldn't find anything. I've always been honest about my experiences in the past so don't you worry, I'll update shortly... patience! | |
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| | Gixxer join:2008-08-27 St Catharines, ON |
Gixxer
Member
2009-Dec-9 8:48 pm
Re: Hard DataLeave it up if you want, my main concern is if you're actually getting 100 days, I'd like to know how because I'm stuck at 30 -- as already stated and would like to do 100ish. | |
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Re: Hard DataUpdated... I tried a few files in the 46 day range in a few groups and they weren't available on Cogeco's news server but were on others. I'm not entirely sure of the specifications of their news server, but I'm almost positive I downloaded something older when they upgraded the server so it's possible they've changed it. | |
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