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Review by collinsit See Profile

  • Location: Brampton, ON, Canada
  • Business customer Business customer
  • Cost: $200 per month (12 month contract)
  • Install: about 10 days
24/7 support - most of the time.
Slower DSL than other providers, poor cancellation policies and bad customer service.
Horrible ISP to work with.
Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:

I have used Pathway Communications for about 2 and a half years now. For the most part, they are ok. It is basic DSL service and seemed to work as well as any other provider I had used before. I pay extra for the service since I have an HSA connection (non pppoe) and it is supposed to be monitored by Pathway. This level of service is important to me since I use the connection for my small business.

Last year I experienced a problem with my internet connection where it went down. I didn't know this till I got back to my office and realized that the connection had been down for a couple hours. I instantly called Pathway and got a tech on the phone quickly. She went through some tests with me including rebooting the DSL modem and so forth (all of which I had already tried). She then determined that it was a Bell line problem and said that she would open a case with them for me and call me back. She never called back. To make a long story short, my internet connection ended up being down for 3 days total. I had to call Pathway half a dozen times and only ever received one call back. My internet went down just before noon on Friday, the call wasn't even opened with Bell till Saturday night and my connection came back up just after lunch on Monday.

I spoke to Pathway the next week and told them that I would be looking for other internet options. I have now switched to Teksavvy and they are awesome. The next problem I ran into was with cancelling my existing service with Pathway. When I called to do this, they said that I could not cancel until the anniversary date of my connection. For me this is 9 months away. I told them that I wanted to cancel right away and explained my reasons for this. They said that this policy was in my contract. I contacted them several times asking for a copy of this contract and they never responded or sent me this contract. After weeks of trying, I escalated the issue and did get a copy of the contract which did say I needed to cancel at the anniversary date.

I accept this and will keep paying for this connection even though I have never heard of this before. They say it is a Bell Canada policy but I know that isn't right since this is the second HSA connection I have had and the first connection I cancelled with 30 days notice.

One final thing here. I decided that since I was paying for this connection in addition to my Teksavvy connection that I might as well use it. When I started to work with the connection doing some consistent downloads I noticed that the speed was about 2.5MB. I did some further testing and sure enough, they were giving me 3MB DSL service. I know that I am 3km from the CO and with my last ISP I had a full 6MB of consistent service.

Summary: Pathway Communications seems like a great business class ISP on the service but the service they deliver is less than that of other ISP's and the price is just as high, if not higher. They also guarantee 24/7 proactive support and do not live up to this. I have yet to get an english speaking person on the phone and some of the tech's have such strong accents that they can be very hard to understand. I was promised a lot when I signed up for service with them and they let me down completely with this and ended up costing me a lot of money when they did.

member for 15.1 years, 25 visits, last login: 13.3 years ago
lodged 15.1 years ago