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Review by jyeung 
UPDATED: 188 days ago
member for 5.6 years, 408 visits, last login: 11 days ago
 North York,ON
 $39 per month
 about 10 days
 Bell Canada
 "Cheap pricing - $39.95/moth for CIA Home Phone and Internet. Good speeds for some people (like myself)."
 "Sometimes long hold times. Unreliable/overloaded network for some people."
 "Hit or miss. You can take a chance and you'll either get good service or unusable service."
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
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I got CIA Cable installed a few weeks ago. Ordered the Home Phone Premium with Free High Speed Internet on their website to test out their service. Shipment was fast - got the cable modem (Motorola SB5101) for $60 + $19.95 shipping in a few days. There is a $50 installation fee if you do not already have Rogers internet.
I live in a Rogers area and they have since stopped selling cable internet as the network is at capacity. Good idea, IMO - they really shouldn't saturate their network more.
Speeds are decent - they promise 7Mbps, but I get a range between 4Mbps-7Mbps. This is contrary to what many other people have experienced - so it's a hit or a miss.
The CIA Home Phone (VoIP) quality is good as it is doesn't go to the internet, only through the CIA network. Works pretty well - I have a Asterisk PBX which connects to their SIP server to terminate calls. Here is a traceroute to their VoIP server:
Tracing route to cms1.tor.cia.com [216.58.0.51]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms buffalo.setup [192.168.1.1]
2 10 ms 8 ms 8 ms 10.110.84.1
3 * * * Request timed out.
4 8 ms 9 ms 7 ms p2-0.bbr01.gta.avalonworks.net [216.58.96.162]
5 11 ms 10 ms 10 ms p1-0.bbr01.nyc.avalonworks.net [216.58.96.161]
6 10 ms 10 ms 11 ms cms1.tor.cia.com [216.58.0.51]
Trace complete.
Customer service, believe it or not, has actually been good. I've had one long hold time (45min+) but most of the time they pick up in less than 10 minutes. I was pretty surprised since the last time I used them they took hours to pick up the phone.
I haven't used them long enough to give an accurate review, so I will be sure to come back and update after a bit. I can't grade them on connection reliability just yet.
*** Please note that this review is only my experience thus far. Others have had horrific experiences, so be warned if you try them out. ***
UPDATE: 25/04/09: Service so far has been quite good. Consistent 6.8 Mbps download speed. Happy so far.
UPDATE: 07/05/09: Speeds still very, very good. As can be seen here:
»www.speedtest.net/result/468181705.png
That is with a Slingbox already using the connection.
UPDATE: 22/05/09: Called in and asked about upgrading my conection. Was quoted an additional $5 to my CIA Home Phone Premium for a Platinum speed connection (10Mbps down, 1Mbps up). Got upgraded a few days ago, getting around 9.3-9.4 Mbps. Very happy so far. The home phone quality has been fantastic as well.
Followup comments:  
peachy
@cia.com
| pretty decent I find that CIA is actually quite good once you're settled in. It's just the setup part that can be a pain especially if you're computer illiterate or have to deal with customer service. I too have found consistently high speeds usually in the 5.0 Mbps range for downtown Toronto. Every now and then my internet cuts out mysteriously in the morning which sucks cause that cuts out my phone line too which I also have with them but I usually find that it comes back within a couple hours. They're service is pretty decent for the price. | |
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myposting
@cia.com | Re: pretty decent I've been getting 1.2 Mbps after 5pm ever since September (downtown Toronto) on cable.  | |
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Oinktastic
join:2005-08-24
Scarborough
 ·TekSavvy Solutions..
 ·3 Web
| Random Comments I assume I'm using the exact same network since I'm using 3web cable, but I'm using the 7Mbit, not the 10Mbit yet.
For the past few days, it's been performing at around 7Mbit the entire day, which makes me think they finally got their stuff sorted out. I'm just noticing that browsing is still a tiny bit sluggish for 7Mbit, but I'm still doing some tweaking with my router/computer and it might just be me. If it continues to perform like this, and I can get the browsing to be a bit snappier, I'm going to upgrade to the 10Mbit service for the little extra speed there and the significantly increased upload speed: 1Mb as opposed to 512Kb.
I'm beginning to recommend people to use this service because I'm finally seeing the same quality as anywhere else, for this great price.
One tiny comment I have is that this review, for some reason, wasn't identified as a Canadian specific review, even though you seem to be using the service in Toronto, same as me. I wonder if anyone will be missing this review because it's not labeled as such. I can only hope the message gets out there to our people and we can start taking advantage of this service!
Thanks for letting me rant  | |
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