Review by soundwafflez Location: Prince Rupert, BC, Canada Cost: $65 per month Install: about 11 days They give you all the information that you need on the website to see that they're gouging you, but you have no other choice. Service is extremely unreliable at prime time, tech support says they'll call you back, but they don't. They know that they're a monopoly, so they don't give a damn about you, why should they?

Pre Sales information: Install Co-ordination: Connection Reliability: Tech Support: Services: Value for money:

Advertised 20 down, 1 up cable connection. This isn't bad, looking at the speedtest.net results of ~18 down and 1.2 up, until you consider the fact that that was the best case scenario. Internet speed often drops to ~12mbps, or even lower during prime time (since we're all responding to past reviewers, I have to say that a drop in service quality during prime time is NOT due to my equipment, even though it is consumer grade, FYI, you don't need a 10 gigabit router and wireless relays in every room in order to have a reliable wireless N connection at 20mbps, and someone tell me how circuit saturation has anything to do with internet quality). Huge packet loss during prime time, as high as 23% when there aren't any technical issues on my side (though it's often around 5-8% even during prime time), can degrade live video streaming performance, or even bring it to a halt. Surprisingly, bittorrent isn't affected as much, but upload and download is still cut in half approximately during normal prime time, bad prime time, and it's much worse, along with all other types of connections. The upstream is also unreliable, albeit above advertised at times.

After I ordered the service, Citywest scheduled a 9 day delay at the latest, but only after complaining twice on the 10th day, did they finally send someone down to start the service. I should not have to call twice after the agreed upon time frame has passed before Citywest finally agrees to send someone down to install the service on the next day.

My biggest gripe is the tech support (if the service is bad, but fixable, then it's perfectly fine), don't get me wrong, there was one person that was suprisingly pleasant to talk to, so maybe it's just my experience, but a few other employees were very rude and had an aggressive stance towards me, even though I had just started the call and had just asked for help on an issue, I am not the type of person to be rude in public or to acquaintances, as I was raised in the traditional fashion. Additionally, as stated above, they are horrible at returning calls, and have failed to return them even if they said that they will call back within 24 hours if the issue doesn't seem to be resolved (hint: it's not, and they don't at all).

The reason for writing this review is because of the increase in quality problems I have been experiencing over the past few weeks.

I have not looked into the reasoning behind all of this, as I have (relatively) recently moved into Prince Rupert, however, I can say that Citywest has been my worst experience with any ISP ever over the past 10 or so months.

I don't understand how someone could like the service here, but since Tim here is calling people out for not revealing their real names, look for Allen.

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