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 Review by Oinktastic 
UPDATED: 63 days ago
member for 4.2 years, 409 visits, last login: a few hours ago
 Scarborough,ON
 $33 per month
 about 7 days
 Bell Canada
 "Good price, very little downtime"
 "Slowdowns during peak hours"
 "Good value, reliable and only alternative to robbers cable in my area"
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection Reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
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Hello everyone,
I have been using 3webXS Cable Gold East, in Scarborough Ontario, since 2005. The plan is 7Mbps/512Kbps and during off-peak times I am able to achieve those speeds on speedtest sites and in actual throughput. During peak hours occasionally it goes more like 1-3Mbps down / 400Kbps up. Unfortunately, lately there has been massive packet loss and higher pings during the evenings. Web pages take many times longer to load during peak hours, browsing is slower and it seems like it struggles to establish connections. I believe this is starting to improve, but time will tell.
When I first signed up, I was seeing a R*gers IP, but 3web have migrated to using more of their own equipment now and I now receive an IP from 3web. The speed was originally 5Mbps/800Kbps back when they were piggy-backing R*gers and the connection was quite stable all around.
The speed of the connection is up and down every few months, sometimes it's good and sometimes frustrating. One of the few complete disconnections (no modem-sync) that I've ever had was when it went out completely once during the evening/night during exam time, and I had to scramble to find a modem and use their free dial-up account, which comes with the highspeed. Thank god that worked, but the timing of that outage was a big inconvenience for me.
The original install went smoothly as I can remember. I think one install date was missed, but eventually, a R*gers guy and his "apprentice" showed up outside my house, unannounced as I remember, and they ran a cable to my house from the pole in freezing temperatures. I was grateful for the work they did in those conditions, but it was a bit painful to watch. I went along for the 'ride' and I know from experience the uncomfort of having to take your gloves off for manual dexterity in subzero weather. The pole which carried the coax to my property had recently been moved due to a complaint from my neighbour and my house hasn't had cable anything in years so they hadn't bothered to re-run the cable back then. They hooked everything up to the box outside and installed a cable TV filter because I don't have cable TV service. When that was all finished, they came inside and made sure that their modem could get a signal from the coax near my computer and we cheered when all the greens light came on. I had already tested the ancient cables running through my walls and connected them properly to bring the signal to my computer. This whole install visit didn't cost me anything, but 3Web had a free installation promotion at the time which I believe took care of that. My actual modem showed up 1-2 days later and synced right away. Unfortunately I'm a tiny bit fuzzy on exact time as it was quite awhile ago now and I didn't bother taking notes. The time from placing the order to syncing my modem was in the range of 5-8 days, but I can't remember precisely.
The service went off a couple times during 2am-5am for scheduled maintenance and a couple times during the migratory period. It also went off once or twice unannounced like I mentioned above. That's when the dial-up account comes in handy. It stays connected for months at a time generally though. The consistency of the speed is the only concern I have right now.
Some services and general notes would be...
Their online live support chat, when I've tried it, has never once been working, but they provide an online form to fill out with your concern/question. E-mails generally get returned, first with an automated message with some keyword-searched generic suggestions and they more often than not follow up within a few days with a real e-mail.
I rarely call their tech-support these days, but in the beginning when I went through the install I encountered their help desk and then maybe several times when there was an outage I decided to call and ask what was up. They went through a period of terribly long on-hold times. I believe it was under 15 minutes last time I called, but I could have been lucky, I'm not sure. Their phone system once put me on hold for 20 minutes and then hung up :-S They have an automated queue which tells you your position in line while you're on hold which is nice I guess. It's not terribly accurate, but it gives a rough approximation.
Overall I've been satisfied enough and hopeful enough that things will get better to stick along for the ride. I went to cable in the first place because my phone lines are over 50 years old and I had trouble with DSL in the past.
Currently using Motorola Surfboard 5100 connected to my Linksys wrt54gs router running dd-wrt. I really appreciate the quality of the modem. I did the rent to own deal they had so it ended up costing about $80 +tx total I believe. If you choose not to buy a modem, you can rent one for $4.95 + tax per month. If you search around you can buy your own modem for a very reasonable price. I found the exact same modem for $10 at a used computer parts place a few months after I bought the new one, but that was a pretty rare find I would think. I bought it and gave it to a friend who I believe is still using it years later.
E-mail accounts are provided and can be accessed through a mail client like Outlook Express or online through mail.3web.com. They say you can have an unlimited number at their domain, but I've only got one at the moment. It seems to be always accessible, but the web interface is a bit simple-looking, though it does do some sorting, spam-filtering and automatic e-mail forwarding. Edit 02/11/09: It was updated recently and they made it a bit nicer and a bit more user-friendly.
The price of the service is decent. I'm paying exactly $32.69/month to 3web for both the Long Distance "Wherever" plan (I'll refer to it as LD from now on) and Cable Internet, including taxes and everything. I signed up for the LD because it shaves $5/month off the price of the internet. The total benefit of using this bundle including the cost of the LD service is to reduce the cost of the service by $2/month because the LD service itself is $3 (flat)/month + the cost of the time you spend calling long distance. The rates they have are fairly competitive and there's a list of their prices on their site. I generally use completely separate calling cards or skype to communicate with people abroad, but if I just dial from my phone, I get a few cents extra on my LD bill for that month. There's also a Long Distance calling card (slightly higher price per minute) that comes with this LD service that I can take around with me that will bill my 3web account when I use it. These charges are on the same page as above.
There was a six month promotion when I first joined so I got my first 6 months for $10 or $15 per month, I don't remember which one it was. There was a strange billing procedure though where they took the entire six month payment upfront and some type of modem deposit and then used that to pay off the first 6 months as well. I had a couple of months where they didn't charge anything because they were using the money they had put on my 3web account already. If I log into my 3web account on their site, I can see my invoices there and they also e-mail me the Long Distance invoice every month. It might be nice to have the invoice for the Internet connection sent there as well. I'll see if I can get that set up. The two charge amounts (1 for internet, one for LD) are actually done at different times during the month it seems, but they both still end up on my credit card bill for the same month.
I guess that's my rant for now. I'll edit it soon with slightly more coherent thoughts. I apologize that it was more like a blog... anyway I hope you Enjoy! :-P
Feel free to contact me with comments or questions. I'll answer them if I can.
Jan 13th 2009. Edit: Speed is good this evening. I am able to surf relatively smoothly and download much quicker than I was able to last week during peak times. Knock on (touch) wood.
Jan 15th 2009. Edit: Spoke too soon :'( 35-40% Packet loss this evening... I had to refresh some pages 3-4 times to get them to load:S
Feb 11th 2009. Edit: Speeds are now bearable in the evenings. Web pages load a bit slower than in off-peak times and videos need to buffer for about 5-10 seconds at times, but mostly, everything's usable. Had one outage a few weeks ago for 2-3 hours around noon. No biggie.
Feb 12th 2009. Edit: It looks like CIA is really moving forward to absorb 3Web's system into their own. I can no longer access the page advertising 3Web's services or find any direct contact info from 3Web support or sales by just searching. I still have access to their "portal" page aka the news, but the 3Web logos are all accompanied or replaced by CIA/Cybersurf logos on the e-mail and billing pages. My e-mail address appears to be now both @3web.com and @cia.com.
May 21st 2009: Tested >6Mbit all day today, even in peak periods. Something good is happening 
Aug 18th 2009: Was really slow recently, especially on weekends. I called in and they said local cable node was congested. I'm not sure because I see the packet loss begin between 209.195.70.90 and 209.195.70.89, which are cybersurf IPs. I'm just saying there's something weird going on there.
They switched me over to DSL, which I'm not enjoying much either. My phone line isn't great. I'm currently on 4032/800 interleave profile and it's still dropping about once a day. I have a feeling Bell could fix me up, but obviously they want to make it painful. To add to that, I'm definitely not getting full speeds out of my current profile and browsing is noticably sluggish during peak hours.
Sep 22nd 2009: Cancelled everything on my 3web/Cybersurf account. I'm going to try another 3rd-party ISP. I will gladly take back the cable connection from 3web if things improve, but I'd rather just have a stable connection right now.
Followup comments:  
Chuck Carlson
@bell.ca
| Rogers will Throttle 3Web silly Rogers has the green light to throttle the cable resellers thus bringing them to their *knees*. This is just what 3Web needs to give them the wake-up call of their life. Har, har, har it couldn't happen to a nicer company. How does 3ThrottledWeb sound? | |
| | | | | tonygets
join:2005-11-10
Scarborough, ON
| Re: Rogers will Throttle 3Web silly When will this happen? i just recently logged speeds of 1000KB/s on bit commet. downloaded 700meg under 15 mins.
Been with them ever since rogers started throttling in my area. All good things will one day come to an end.
DSL is no good in my area. top speed is maybe a 2MegaBit conection in my neighbourhood.
Can anyone recomend any substitues.
Thank you | |
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Oinktastic
join:2005-08-24
Scarborough
 ·TekSavvy Solutions..
 ·3 Web
1 edit | Re: Rogers will Throttle 3Web silly For the most part, I'm content with my 3web service as well and I've had it since 2005. As far as I know there are no other cable internet providers in my area (Scarborough Ontario) besides them and R*gers.
I still frequently receive very good download speeds of ~7Mbit which is where my connection is capped. I have not experienced any throttling and will let everyone here know the minute that I do notice anything like that. | |
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wanderingcat
| Thanks i am also considering to switch to 3web since Rogers is going to increase the price by ~10% !
but seems now 3web's cable internet is only availalbe in the west: »https://www2.cia.com/products/highspeed.html
I entered a Vancouver postcode V6C 3A6, then you have 2 choices, DSL or Cable. But when I entered my home post code (North York), the only choice is DSL. | |
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Oinktastic
join:2005-08-24
Scarborough
·TekSavvy Solutions..
·3 Web
| Re: Thanks It looks like they took down their site which used to show all of their services (www.get3web.com). At least I cannot access it right now. I guess this is part of the takeover by Cybersurf/CIA. They're putting everything under their own website - cia.com
3Web's phone number used to be 1-866-Get3web, but if that's no longer active, you should try 1-877-7-GET-CIA. They should be able to give you some answers and I THINK you would probably be dealing directly with CIA now since they're taking over. I'm not 100% on this one yet though, but that's what it looks like.
It's possible that they don't serve North York at this time. If that's the case, there are tons of great and inexpensive reseller DSL companies that you can try (if your phone lines are in good order). Wireless may be an option as well, depending on your latency needs.
I do not know of any other cable resellers in the GTA. If anyone does, let me know. If you'd like a list of ~30/month DSL providers, I know of quite a few and you can find them by searching dslreports.com or most are listed on canadianisp.ca. I find these smaller providers are often more client-friendly than the big guys in general. Unfortunately, they have to go through the big guys to get service to you. | |
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