Review by urbanriot  - Location: St Catharines,ON
- Cost: $129 per month (36 month contract)
Good "NEVER goes down, 30+ day binary newsgroup support, amazing speeds, and excellent support."
Bad "Overage charges! Slower in denser areas."
Overall "Excellent ISP for web browsing, emailing, gaming, speed; Bad for heavy downloading unless you get the business package."
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(ratings match consensus)
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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 main flaw:
- a limited 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 speak a clear and understandable English who are available 24/7. Most of my experiences with them have been pretty good.
- some highly motivated, dedicated and skilled on-site techs (and a few that are not so much)
- I experience minimal internet downtime, maybe once or twice a year; outages are extremely rare in the city
Cogeco's additional negative points:
- they hide the real prices of their packages 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 personal are not aware of issues that they should be aware of, to better help customers often which result in.
- an inability to repair or diagnose issues that clearly exist outside your home and don't require service calls
- undetermined effects of upstream packet filtering (fortunately no downstream filtering yet)
- 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.
Note: If you're a heavy downloader, consider the business accounts as there's a good possibility you won't experience the overage charges that are applied to residential accounts. Hint hint.
member for 8.9 years, 3854 visits, last login: a few hours ago
updated 44 days ago
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