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Review by jbamford 
member for 12.7 years, 3093 visits, last login: a few hours ago
updated a few hours ago
 Oakville,ON
 $60 per month about 4 days "Speed is great and the connection is stable" "Caps are low" "Sticking with the devil I know"
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Have had the service since 2004, mainly ok during my use. Of course I've had a couple of modems replaced, and a move in 2012 went ok apart from the new modem not being provisioned for the new DOCSIS 3 package. Quickly resolved with a phone call to support.
Caps are low, and I'm hovering just under the limit.
[2013 update] Had to move up to next package level (Ultimate 30 from Turbo 20) to get a decent data allowance each month. Performance is good, always seem to get the right speed. No issues with quality of service.
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Review by spikernum1
member for 3.2 years, 184 visits, last login: 1 days ago
updated 5 days ago
- Burlington,ON
- $218 per month
- (24 month contract)
- about 5 days
- "Easy to setup and get going. Good quality internet."
- "Horrible TV service. Poor pricing unless you are on promotions. Usage monitor is completely broken."
- "It's good for people who don't mind paying extra for ease of use."
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# The Good #
I signed up over 2 years ago with Cogeco and was very happy at the beginning. They were able to come in and setup all my services within 5 days of my initial call with them.
My initial bills were very cheap too ($150/month) and I was pleased with the cost for the services I was receiving. I was on 4 or 5 promotions at the time.
The Internet I ordered was 14 down/1 up and it was accurate to that almost 99% of the time. No significant downtimes and no connection issues throughout my entire contract.
# The Bad #
The bandwidth meter for the Internet is broken. I have my modem connected directly to my router, so all my traffic going to Cogeco goes through my router. I have traffic monitoring software setup, and the traffic that goes through my router does not match the traffic that Cogeco's bandwidth meter believes I've used.
I have two HD PVR's in my house, and neither record shows properly. It's really hit or miss. I'm not sure it is Cogeco's fault or the PVR manufacturer's fault. The entire PVR software is just a complete flop.
# The Ugly #
When Cogeco's bandwidth cap for my plan was at 60GB/month, my family constantly used 40-60GB every month. Never went over.
Once Cogeco bumped our cap up to 80GB/month, my bandwidth usage sky-rocketed to 80-90GB/month. No change in download/upload habits... but it was constantly 80-90GB/month.
My monthly bill has now reached $220/month now that I'm almost done all my promotions - and that is without any bandwidth overage. In 3 more months, my last promotion will expire and I will be paying $240/month.
# The Outcome #
As of March 2012, I am now actively searching to replace all my Cogeco services.
Their customer service did not want to help me stay with them when I told them I enjoyed their services, but not what they are giving me in terms of pricing.
It seems as though, to get a discount from Cogeco, you have to berate their customer service, be transferred to Customer Retention, and they will throw some promotions at you. My co-worker does this every 6 months to stay at the cheapest. Unfortunately, it does not work for me because I don't like yelling at someone for my own personal gain.
It is a horrible system where you have to be a terrible rude customer to get the discounts.
If you are a well mannered, kind person, who always pays their over-priced services on time... well, it doesn't matter... you are out of luck.
##### 1 Year Later #####
I moved my internet service to Start Communications. I've never been so happy...
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Review by maxboha
member for 1 year, 190 visits, last login: 2 days ago
lodged 7 days ago
- Acton Vale,QC
- $60 per month
- (12 month contract)
- about 60 days
- "Vitesse rapide, constente et ping très bas"
- "Prix, limites mensuelle de 400go"
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J'ai commandé il y a environ 2 mois le forfait business de cogeco 10/2 avec 400 go pour 59.95 $ par mois avec contrat de 12 mois. L'installation, ca pris 2 fois parce que le sol était gelée. Donc ca pris 2 mois avant que je me fasse brancher. J'étais extrêmement heureux d'avoir oublier de cancellé bell la journée meme.. L'installation a été clean, très bien faite , et les 2 techniciens ont fait ca en moins de 2h !  Ils ont été très polis , courtois et ils sont vraiment qualifiés ! (comparativement au tech de bell)
Les qualités de la ligne sont excellente
J'avais ses choix la :
cooptel : 10/0.8
Bell: 6/0.8
Cogeco 14/2 (j'ai pris 10/2 business)
Donc si vous vivez en region et que vous avez seulement ses choix la, optez pour cogeco ! C'est les moins voleurs de tous, meme si leurs prix sont exorbitants..
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 Review by hairspring
member for 5.4 years, 668 visits, last login: 1 days ago
updated 31 days ago
- Oakville,ON
- $45 per month
- (12 month contract)
- about 10 days
- "solid connection, good speed, solid support"
- "cap is too low, overage fees are way too high"
- "Caps are better but still not competitive. If you can get an alternative ISP, then do so."
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Cogeco was really my only feasible option. Could have gone DSL dry loop but didn't want the hassle of dealing with Bell, either directly or indirectly.
Order was done in about 20 minutes, bundled with cable TV. Walked out with a plan, an install date, and my cable box.
Tech showed up on time for the install. Called me up and delivered an RCA modem. Up and running in about 30 mins.
Had the service since April 2009. No issues to speak of since.
The cap is a little low but I don't realistically exceed it with my normal usage. I am getting very concerned by the overage fees. My most recent bill (May 2012) charged me an extra $30 for 18GB of overuse. This nearly doubles my internet bill. As a customer that rarely exceeds the cap, I feel I should be able to bank some bandwidth in the rare circumstance I go over. I am now actively looking for another provider.
Update June-27-2010 -- Service still fine. No outages or speed issues. I'm a little concerned about the price increases. $10 more over the last year seems excessive.
Update - Nov-13-2010 -- Downgraded to High Speed Lite to save some bucks. Also downgraded my TV to basic cable. The customer service rep I spoke to was efficient and helpful. Everything happened on time. Service is still solid.
Update - Mar-14-2012 -- Service is still solid. A little slow sometimes. I would guess my node is getting busier. I still find the prices quite high considering the low cap. I had one incident that required tech support. It was a simple problem that they helped me fix right away.
Update - Apr-12-2012 -- I'm downgrading connection reliability and service each by one due to recent problems. I'm going to contact Tech Support and re-evaluate based on the result.
Update - May 12-2012 - I'm upgrading connection reliability and service back up to where they were prior to my issues. A tech arrived on time and did what he could (problem was not present at the time). He replaced my modem and re-patched the connection. No issues with the connection or speed since. I'm downgrading Value to the worst possible value based on my last bill (see note above).
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Review by Defiant001
member for 1.7 years, 48 visits, last login: a few minutes ago
updated 32 days ago
- Oakville,ON
- $81 per month
- (24 month contract)
- about 5 days
- "Reliable connection, always fast"
- "Terrible policies and customer support"
- "Uptime at the trade off of abysmal customer service"
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Package: Ultimate 30 - $81.30/month
Speed: 30Mbps down/2 Mbps up/Currently 275GB cap
Term: Been signed up for just over 2 years, no contract, was always month to month
Modem: Cisco DOCSIS 3 modem
I signed up for Cogeco when I moved to Oakville from Vaughan, I was originally excited to be switching from Rogers as they were nearly unusable due to an unstable connection (I was on 28 meg at the time) and bad customer service and Cogeco seemed to offer a better connection for less money with a higher cap.
I've now been with Cogeco on their Ultimate 30 for just over 2 years and I'm switching to Teksavvy as they just became available, my issue isn't with the connection itself, that has been great. My problem with Cogeco is the customer service which seems more interested in excuses and stonewalling than anything else. Every time I call in they immediately have an attitude problem, the exception to this was one support call due to me getting half the speed I was supposed to, and the original call to order the service.
Some examples of this would be when I've called in asking about paying for a larger cap, I'm very specific about not needing the Ultimate 60 package, I just need a higher cap. They never seem to be able to comprehend this, and just recommend Ultimate 60 over and over. Whenever I inquire about a higher cap they tell me in different ways that I should just lower my usage, even though I'm sitting there ASKING to pay more money for a larger cap. Another time when I called in the rep had no idea what a "Linksys Router" was, seriously? I do a lot of uploading and this is always the target when I ask about a higher cap, they just tell me to upload less, as if thats some sort of solution.
My personal favourite was the one unique suggestion they had, which was to sign me up for a second Ultimate 30 package and I could swap out my modem every half month to use the second package/cap. Are you freaking serious? They also suggested I get the business connection, but I need a business license to get it, which I do not have, this confused them as in their minds only businesses could ever use 150GB+ a month apparently. They are also arrogant about their caps too, telling me its "more than enough" for me, explaining that I'm keeping the usage below the cap on purpose is a foreign concept to them. My usage is below BECAUSE of the cap, not because thats where it would normally be.
Some good about Cogeco would be the late night tech support. I called in once around midnight (apparently they are 24 hour support) and talked with a guy who was pretty good. I was only getting 20 megs when my connection was 30, he saw the issue right away (on their side, a junction was over capacity) and the next day I was back up to 30.
Another good point is that they do increase the caps, when I originally signed up I had 125GB a month, then the pack was upped to 175GB, and now its 275GB. This is good, but an unlimited option would be a good idea, but they don't seem to understand what that is.
However terrible customer service and the constant price hikes for now reason other than "because we legally can" were the final straw for Cogeco for me, as soon as I saw Teksavvy available I called to cancel which ironically was the most efficient and easy call I've had with them.
Overall I would say Cogeco would be fine for people who aren't overly concerned with online media or anything bandwidth intensive, the connection is stable and the supplied modem is good. The installer was friendly and knew his stuff. As long as you never have to speak to customer service about anything beyond the most basic of questions related to billing you should be fine. Otherwise steer clear and get a third party ISP in Cogeco land.
Comments:
 Reviews:
 ·Cogeco Cable
| Anyone can get a business account, you don't need a license. Just to point out a mistake you'd made above - you don't need a business license to get a business account. Plenty of people have followed similar suggestions, often made by other users, to get the business account as its not restricted the same as the residential account.
You could easily get the business account in your personal name if you wanted, it doesn't need to be a business. | |
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 Review by WiMax
member for 9.8 years, 78 visits, last login: 13 days ago
updated 36 days ago
- Port Colborne,ON
- $47 per month
- (12 month contract)
- about 17 days
- "It works."
- "Poor install service, low band caps, billing is 20th century archaic, prices are too high"
- "TERRIBLE CUSTOMER SERVICE, high prices, low bandwidth! There are no other options. Thank you CRTC."
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TODAY (22Mar13) I am finally free of Cogeco's after 12+ years of poor customer service and continuously rising prices well beyond the rate of inflation. Thank you Government of Canada and CRTC for forcing competition and thanks start.ca for 5 star service and competitive prices!
Sep 12 - I received a fifth letter stating that prices are going up yet again?
01Aug11 I received the fourth letter in as many years stating that they are RAISING PRICES AGAIN! My costs of HSI have gone up 70% in the past 4 years.
The past year, the service has become very unreliable as an apparent result of extensive throttling (bandwidth shaping). The CRTC outlaws throttling of VOIP but that has not stopped them. They claim they are not doing it and yet Rogers said the same thing recently and got caught!
They won't install a calibrated meter at my house so I'm forced to believe them that their meters are working fine. The fact is, Cogeco admitted last year that their metering was not working properly and that's why they delayed cap enforcement. I don't believe it was ever fixed and now they are gouging.
The last three moves, Cogeco didn't bother to show up on the appointment date or even call in advance to cancel. I took time off work and waited around all day each time.
Bottom line: TERRIBLE CUSTOMER SERVICE, high prices, low bandwidth, high bandwidth overcharges, their meter does not work, the CRTC has given them a license to blackmail and print money!
Comments:
| | ^ Call them. Tell them you're cancelling, and wait for 30 days. When they call asking to keep your service, thats when you negotiate your price. | |
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 Review by teddy
member for 11.2 years, 2670 visits, last login: 1 days ago
updated 57 days ago
- Kingston,ON
- $72 per month
- "Fast!! On the Standard package."
- "Low caps, especially considering the price."
- "Good solid service, but there are cheaper options."
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Price is $71.95 + tax.
We were previously on Bell Sympatico DSL but switched to Cogeco for a 12 month promotional rate of $108 including High Speed Standard, Digital Phone, and Digital Cable Basic. It was a fantastic deal at the time, however the promotional rate did eventually end and overtime prices inevitably raised a little bit at a time.
Speed is 30/2mbps, with a cap of 175GB/month with overage charges of $1.00/GB. Speed is always as advertised.
For the price I'm paying it's definitely steep. With the option of Start Communications now I'm going to have to really consider moving away.
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Review by MysticGuitar
member for 1 year, 129 visits, last login: 1 days ago
lodged 63 days ago
- Waterdown,ON
- $300 per month
- (12 month contract)
- about 6 days
- "Tech support, large On Demand selection, fantastic phone service"
- "High internet prices, high on-demand rental prices, fairly barebone television service, internet reliability issues"
- "Cogeco offers a truly amazing home phone service, but lacks with their internet and television offerings."
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My Plans:
Television: HD Digital Select 8 + Movie Network
(TV#2 same plan, but without HD)
Internet: Ultimate 60
Phone: Freedom
I'm not generally impressed with Cogeco's television services, nor am I unimpressed. They get the job done, and the HD programming has little to no visual artifacts. Cogeco offers a fairly barebone television service, one that meets all of your basic expectations, but doesn't go beyond the television medium with any kind of additional 'smart' features, such as those being offered by both Rogers and Bell. (ex. apps)
Cogeco provides a fairly significant amount of On Demand programming, even though the quality of all television shows is standard definition, most movies are available in HD, including the movies found on the 'Premium' section, such as The Movie Network content. The movies, excluding those offered in premium subscription plans, has an average rental fee of $7.95 for HD new releases. This price is higher than other internet-based rental services, such as Apple's iTunes store (which charges $5.99 for an HD rental of new releases), it is still an acceptable price for most movie-goers looking for a quick flick to watch on a Friday night with the family. Still, for heavy movie watchers, this may be a thing to consider before choosing to switch to Cogeco.
Although Cogeco has been expanding and improving their internet offerings over the years by including a higher monthly bandwidth cap, as well as increasing the speeds of the various plans that Cogeco provides. They are behind the competition in terms of upload channel speed and general network reliability. A 60 Mbps download connection coupled with a 2 Mbps upload channel doesn't justify a $100 monthly price, especially when you consider the speeds offered by the other internet service providers throughout Ontario, with Bell offering 50/10 connections at a price of $82.95, and Rogers having 45/4 for $74.99, Cogeco is simply not a viable option as an internet service provider. However, this is a very different story when it comes to the Cogeco phone services.
Cogeco, although not generally known as being a telephone provider, actually offers an outstanding phone service at prices far lower than both Bell and Rogers. Cogeco's Freedom plan is $50.99 monthly, and includes unlimited North American calling at any time of the day, a service that most other provides charge at a premium. For instance, Bell offers a comparable service with their Home phone Choice plan, which includes 5 free calling features. This plan is $42.94 monthly. For long distance calling, you must pay an additional $31.90, making your total monthly price $74.84.
I just can't stress enough how Cogeco's phone service is a truly amazing service for the price, and highly recommend Cogeco for their phone services alone. However, for internet or television, there are other far better providers out there to choose from.
When it comes to tech support, specifically phone-based support, the Cogeco agents were fairly polite and knowledgeable with their assigned departments. Although I've found myself at times being cycled between various agents before my problem could be resolved, they always treated me with respect and understanding. Cogeco has always been able to help, no matter how minor or severe the problem. That being said, one of the agents I've talked with recently did not know how to properly help me with my problem, and started to suggest I buy or subscribe to an additional package, which had absolutely nothing to do with the problem at hand. This specific agent at times made all kinds of suggestions as to what may be causing the problem, none of which were at all logical, and seemed to be nothing more than rapid guessing. So, even though Cogeco support isn't perfect, they remain to be one of the better tech support services I've come in contact with, if not the absolute best.
Comments:
| | Order To Live? Just to confirm, the 'From Order To Live' field is the amount of time it took Cogeco to set up and activate my services once my order has been filed. Is that correct? | |
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 Review by urbanriot
member for 8.5 years, 3660 visits, last login: a few hours ago
updated 93 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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 Review by JB
member for 4 years, 984 visits, last login: 1 days ago
updated 100 days ago
- undisclosed location
- $100 per month
- (12 month contract)
- about 4 days
- "Fast. 30Mb at a pretty good price."
- "Extremely low caps for this day and age. High overages."
- "A little pricey, but the internet is stable and the TV is not bad."
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Update 02/7/2013
I moved and had Cogeco set up at my new place. I got a free HD Receiver rental for 12 months for a 1 year contract, not too bad. Internet is still flawless and they managed to raise their caps since my last update. TV is still good although the HD Receiver we received seems a little slow, we'll see how it works in a couple of months.
Update - 09/30/2010
Upgraded to the 30 Mb Extreme Package w/ 125 GB cap. Upgraded the package, got a new modem, plugged it in and instantly saw great speeds. Quick and pretty painless.
Have had a couple audio dropouts on my tv recently, may look into upgrading to digital cable.
Update - 11/13/2009
Had Cogeco Classic Cable TV Installed
Install went fine, pretty good price $28 / month and this also comes with a lower internet bill. So it's a pretty good deal. I am pleased that at least their installs go fine.
I adjusted my ratings accordingly, but Cogeco still has a long way to go in their internet department.
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