 Review by urbanriot 
member for 8.5 years, 3661 visits, last login: a few hours ago
updated 94 days ago
 St Catharines,ON
 $129 per month- (36 month contract)
 "NEVER goes down, 30+ day binary newsgroup support, amazing speeds, and excellent support." "Overage charges! Slower in denser areas." "Excellent ISP for web browsing, emailing, gaming, speed; Bad for heavy downloading unless you get the business package."
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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 has 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 9 - 16ms, faster than everyone else in the server.
- newsgroup support with at least 30 day retention, which most ISP's are no longer offering, with support for many popular binary groups.
- a strong team of employees that seem to genuinely care about their users
- local knowledgeable tech support that speak a clear and understandable English who are available 24/7
- some highly motivated, dedicated and skilled on-site techs (and some that are not so much)
- I experience minimal internet downtime, maybe once or twice a year, very rare
Cogeco's additional negative points:
- 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.
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- 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 could fine tune the package pricing on their web page just a little bit, to be crystal clear to people who don't know about the fine print. Bell's pricing structure is clearer.
- 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.
I've had so few issues with Cogeco that I haven't called them with a personal service issue in ages, but I do have experience with their support system calling on behalf of other people.
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.
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