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Review by webomen  Posted: 1 days ago member for 155 days, 3 visits, last login: 1 days ago
North York,ON
$18 per month (12 month contract)
about 5 days
Bell Canada
"Efficient and reliable"
"Nothin really..maybe improve on getting faster speeds..."
"A lot better than Rogers"
| Pre Sales information: Install Co-ordination: Connection reliability: Tech Support: Services: Value for money: (ratings match consensus)
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I was skeptical to move to Acanac, due to Bell hunting down torrent users. However, I now can say that it was the best decision I made, the value you receive for your buck is amazing. I can only recommend it to people who had enough of Rogers stealing every penny you got.
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Review by kwadcu  Posted: 7 days ago Fair warning: reviewer joined this month
Mount Pleasant,ON
Contract price not specified. (12 month contract)
about 4 days
"Fast setup, great service"
"none!"
"Best bang for your buck"
| Pre Sales information: Install Co-ordination: Connection reliability: Tech Support: Services: Value for money: (ratings above consensus)
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Placed order online on a Friday, received the modem the following Tuesday and internet up and running the next day.
Was weary about going with Acanac, but from the reviews I decided to try it and so far I am very impressed. Modem came pre configured. All I had to do was unplug my sympatico modem, plug in the one I rec'd from Acanac and that was it.
I was so sick of Bell's customer service and support, plus now they have a 60 gig bandwidth limit, which if you go over you get charged $25 to go along with their $48 monthly fee. Now I pay $19/mth unlimited bandwidth plus I get exactly the same speed I had with Bell.
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Review by (hidden by request) Posted: 9 days ago (review was emailed from domain shaw.ca)
Toronto,ON
$32 per month (12 month contract)
about 15 days
"Good value for money"
"Minor down time"
"Great company"
| Pre Sales information: Install Co-ordination: Connection reliability: Tech Support: Services: Value for money: (ratings match consensus)
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Price and relaibility was my concern. When the ISP does have some downtown once a month. It usually recovers very quickly.
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Review by moseph  UPDATED: 13 days ago member for 17 days, 2 visits, last login: 11 days ago
undisclosed location
Contract price not specified. (12 month contract)
"Cheap"
"unreliable, unreachable and useless technical support"
| Pre Sales information: Install Co-ordination: Connection reliability: Tech Support: Services: Value for money: (ratings well below consensus)
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I put up with this service's patchiness for the past 11 months - up down but was managable on the basis that I knew how to trouble shoot and hook the internet up myself.
11 months later, the dsl light on the modem died. Can't call the non existent tech support on the weekend, so emailed them form my BB, 1 day later I receive an answer from them asking me to retrieve "circuit ID" from my phone provider. given that I am with Vonage and now such thing exists, I informed tech support about this and they came back with "you need a dry loop and that will cost 8 extra dollars a month please give us your credit card info". and that my service is not compatible with an IP phone ---- just like that, all of a sudden my service became "incompatible"
on the contrary, their billing department replied with lightning speed to my request to cancel the account, and offered to help resolved my tech issues --- too little to late
Never again,
Followup comments:  InMontreal Throttled
join:2003-07-25 Montreal, QC
·VIF Internet
·AEI Internet
| DRY-LOOP ! This is the way it works for *ANY* DSL provider: If you don't have a landline phone service (Bell, Rogers), you need DRY-LOOP to keep your DSL service !!!
At the time you disconnected your phone line, it was YOUR responsability to contact your ISP. Bell should have even take out your DSL sync from day one, but you were lucky all this time.
You should now go on and pay for the dry-loop you were supposed to pay x months ago. Only person to blame in your situation is yourself. Stop blaming your ignorance to your ISP.
As for Acanac's business hours...
DSL Phone Support : Mon-Fri 9am-12am 1-866-281-3538
* If your service is down after hours please e-mail our emergency department. -- "I unofficially declare Beaver Hunting Season is on!" (© DR_JAYMAHDI) | |
|  |   moseph_again
@bell.ca
| Re: DRY-LOOP ! A quality response from a quality company (sarcastic of course) this goes to show the level of Immatureness you operate at.
A simple informative email would have resolved this and saved your degrading reputation.
and as to your respectable "emergency department" at least set the expectations right with your customers and tell them that they are expected to wait a day or 2 for an emergency response | |
|  |  |  |  |   Acanac Inc Premium join:2007-03-05 Mississauga, ON
edit: August 22nd, @05:59PM
| Re: DRY-LOOP ! Our emergency department can only be contacted by email. Yes for DSL clients it might not be that useful, but we do offer more than just DSL service. We offer Voip and our Online PC service. In time we will offer 24 hour support. The plan is to do it once we reach 50K clients. We are currently a bit over 38K. Weekends will be first. At least from 9AM to 9PM.
Everthing takes time, but things have come together over the past two years. | |
|   srik
@acanac.net | Acanac As was said their tech support is non-existence. It goes down like once or max twice a month and comes back up in a day's time worst case. yep if u r running a biz then i wouldn't not suggest them | |
|  |   Acanac Inc Premium join:2007-03-05 Mississauga, ON
| Re: Acanac If your modem is disconnection its not our fault. This means your to far from the CO or your have a bad connection. Our support is not able to help in either case. I would recommend Cable in these casese. This is one of the main reason why we offer a 30 day money back guarantee. | |
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Review by Pastuch  UPDATED: 14 days ago member for 4.5 years, 52 visits, last login: a few hours ago
Kanata,ON
$30 per month (12 month contract)
about 12 days
"Price, Modem delivery was quick"
"1.7 meg service... When you're paying for 5megs."
"Avoid any ISP that relies on Bell infrastructure"
| Pre Sales information: Install Co-ordination: Connection reliability: Tech Support: Services: Value for money: (ratings below consensus)
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Summary: Pay for 5meg service. Get 1.7meg service.
Update August 15th: Paul (Acanac owner) frequents this site and after I IMed him he offered to refund my full year of service. I certainly wasn't expecting this and I have to say I'm impressed with the service Acanac provides.
Price:
The price of the service is excellent at 18.95 per month but requires you to sign on a one year contract. The downside to this obviously is the contract. In my case I am stuck with a 1.7meg internet connection for a year. Bell also charges a system access fee of nearly $9 per month for Dryline DSL. Dryline means that you don't have a home phone. So if you're like many Canadians who only have a cell phone then you will need to pay this extra charge.
Setup:
I was impressed with the speed of delivery of my modem. I was also impressed with the recruitment people at Acanac. I didn't feel like they were trying to swindle me and they informed me of all the surcharges I could expect.
Internet connection and customer support:
I am flabbergasted by the poor quality of my connection with Acanac(bell). My internet connection has been re-profiled 4 times that I know of since I signed up. On initial installation I was getting a 3meg profile. I submitted a support ticket via the Acanac website and was pleasantly surprised to have my connection re-profiled to a 4meg connection. That lasted 2 weeks then Bell re-profiled me to a 2.5 Meg connection. That was infuriating so I submitted another ticket to have my connection re-profiled. I put that ticket in 2 months ago and my connection has gone from bad to worse. Recently I was re-profiled again down to a 1.7meg internet connection. I have sent 3 emails about my connection and every time Acanac support tells me they will look into it or they say a tech will come out to fix it but nothing ever happens.
I'm tired of waiting so I figured I would write this review. I have had Acanac for 5 months and I have no intention of renewing the service.
Followup comments:  PCcertified
join:2008-08-04 canada
| It's not Acanac's fault. Bell is to blame. I feel your pain, I just joined Acanac this week and my speed dropped from 5Mbs with Bell to 1.6Mbs with Acanac.
I did some research and discovered that Bell controls the speed. I also discovered that Bell changed my profile to a 3 Meg profile even though Acanac requested a 5 meg profile. They also made sure it was a very poorly configured profile for my present modem, thus rendering my speed at 1.6Mbs.
It's not Acanac's fault. There are 2 possible reasons why you are getting slow speeds.
1. Your speed profile may be incorrectly set. - You can check your present profile by going into your modems software. You can verify with an Acanac tech exactly how to check this. The Tech at Acanac can also tell you what numbers should appear in your Tx and Rx speeds.
2. You have a poor line quality to the CO. You can verify this by calling sympatico and being polite to the first level tech as you request to ask a question about your line speed. First level will not be able to answer why your profile is set incorrectly despite numerous requests by your ISP. But, the tech can justify transferring you to 2nd level support. The 2nd level support should be able to check your line quality and tell you what speed you can handle.
In my case I can handle 16 Megs and have a near perfect line. I'm also located less than 0.7 km from my CO. So there is no reason to set my profile to 3Mbs unless Bell is intentionally trying to harm the reputation of their competitor.
If your line quality is BAD, that second level tech can order a Bell tech to fix it. If your line quality is GREAT like mine, you must call Acanac and request they tell Bell to modify your profile to improve your performance. You can also ask to be transfered directly to the line test center at Bell and then you can get the modifications immediately with a tech who can make the changes. Not all Acanac employees have the number but I'm sure if you insist they will transfer you.
I was informed by Bell level 2 Tech that the independent providers like Acanac should transfer me to the line test center at Bell in these kinds of major circumstances.
I hope this helps you resolve your issue. In the mean time if your profile is not set correctly after many attempts, get Acanac to email you a copy of the requests they made to Bell to modify your profile. Then contact the CRTC to complain that Bell is not treating you fairly. After all it's not Acanac's fault, unfortunately it's Bell who controls your line speed in Quebec or Ontario.
Emailing the CRTC will definately help prove Bell is being deliberate in their attempts to discredit their competition.
Here's the link »www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/INFO_SHT/t1003.htm | |
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Review by salih.nabeel Posted: 15 days ago (review was emailed from domain gmail.com)
Mississauga,ON
$19 per month (12 month contract)
about 5 days
Bell Canada
"Fast, easy to setup, cheap and reliable"
"None"
"Very good service and woul recommend them"
| Pre Sales information: Install Co-ordination: Connection reliability: Tech Support: Services: Value for money: (ratings above consensus)
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I ordered the service and in two day I received the modem. Installed and it was active the next day. tested for speed it was 4200Kbps foe dl. Good community forum, and a lot of help. I am happy with the service and would definetly recommend it for my friends.
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Review by lambergino  UPDATED: 18 days ago member for 18 days, 0 visits, last login: 18 days ago
Richmond Hill,ON
$19 per month (12 month contract)
about 6 days
Bell Canada
"Unlimited Downloading, free SSH Tunnel 100GB FTP and Online PC"
"Got nothing to complain about..."
"Excellent ISP All Around, The cheapest, most reliable, and biggest bang for bucks that can be found!"
| Pre Sales information: Install Co-ordination: Connection reliability: Tech Support: Services: Value for money: (ratings above consensus)
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I was with Bell Sympatico for the last 5 years and after suffering their throttling and traffic shaping for a few months it was time to call it quits... I called them and cancelled the service then looked all over the internet for the best DSL ISP that was available in my area.
I found Acanac and Tekssavy here on dslreports.com and although Tekssavy had better reviews I decided to go for Acanac because it was 10 bucks cheaper per month than the already cheap teksavvy!!! Now for less than $20 a month you can NOT get any better than this and THIS is pretty darn good!
The Million Dollar Question: Does Acanac Throttle? By default the connection gets throttled by bell (because every dsl provider is on bell lines) HOWEVER they offer you your very own SSH Tunnel proxy server which you can set up in about 5 minutes and enjoy FULL un-throttled torrent speeds and the work around is explained in their forums and is totally legal!!!
You must pay the whole contract term at the same time meaning I paid $227.70 (taxes and everything included $18.95 a month) for 12 months for the exact same service offered by Teksavvy (which would end up costing $400+) PLUS lots of extra free features such as 100GB FTP space... Free Online PC without root access... and most importantly SSH Tunneling which gives me FULL 600-700 KB/s torrent speeds when set up correctly with Tunnelier and uTorrent. Thats amazing! but it doesnt end there.
The whole setup took about 6 days and a bell technician came to my door one day to setup the connection however he said nothing needs to be done because I was previously with Sympatico so wires are connected already.
So yes Acanac uses bell lines of course but that's the ONLY thing of bell's they use. Everything else is on their own servers meaning you get un-throttled speeds using SSH Tunneling.
I called technical support and they gave me the user and pass and settings and I ended up using the same 2wire router/modem that Sympatico gives you ( 2701HG-G ) and it has worked great since day one. No down times yet and I dont think there will ever be.
Whats better is that they offer 30 days unconditional money back guarantee so even if it doesn't work out for you then you can always get a refund of your $278. You do not need the $50 to lease modem from them if you got a ADSL modem or gateway like me so that's a plus too.
So they say up to 5mbps Download and 800kbps upload? When I was all connected I went over to speedtest.net and did a test with result as follows:
5160kbps down and 678kbps up SO SPEEDS ARE AS ADVERTISED!!!
The only and I mean ONLY so called "problem" or "issue" that I have faced is that the SSH Tunnel client sometimes times out connection but then quickly reconnects and torrents begin to resume again. And that is a nature of any SSH Tunnel and its client so it can't really be blamed on the ISP...
It has almost been 30 days that I am with them and I can say I can't be happier with my ISP!
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Review by hbensmai Posted: 18 days ago (review was emailed from domain yahoo.com)
Montreal,QC
$18 per month (12 month contract)
about 45 days
Bell Canada
"Excellent connection, fast email response, Excellent value....."
"Cannot update credit card information online after expiration... Cannot change plan online"
"Drop Bell and Rogers and go for Acanac..."
| Pre Sales information: Install Co-ordination: Connection reliability: Tech Support: Services: Value for money: (ratings match consensus)
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I am happy that I switched from Bell sympatico to Acanac. No throttling, no connections drops...
The only bad thing about Acanac is how the customer account is managed. There is no way to change your customer information online. For example, my credit card will expire in November and the renewal is in April of next year. I have to call them to change that information. Also you cannot change your plan online..If you are on a yearly, you have to call them to change to monthly before it expires if you don't wanna get charged for the full year. Besides that, Acanac is way better than Bell.
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Review by sabsant  UPDATED: 19 days ago member for 275 days, 37 visits, last login: 8 days ago
undisclosed location
$18 per month (12 month contract)
about 5 days
"Fast, Reliable, Unlimited, all for a Great price. Pre-paid billing a plus."
"Support a little light during nights. Bell mistakenly put me on a 3Mbps profile. Order Form doesn't make any note of 40$ deposit"
"Highly recommended. Especially over Rogers"
| Pre Sales information: Install Co-ordination: Connection reliability: Tech Support: Services: Value for money: (ratings match consensus)
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I was a Rogers lite subscriber for 7 years, started at their 128kbps profile for $24/m but gradually they increased it to 1Mbps / $38/m.
Acanac's $18.95 (tax-included!) for the first year was tempting. When Rogers started to enforce their caps (lite was at 25 GB for a time!), I decided it was time to switch. I hate streaming video/music and wondering if Im nearing my pittance of a cap.
I signed up for their 5Mbit/Unlimited profile online. They normally take a $40 deposit for their hardware, but if you make a note (in the comments section of the order form) for them not to send you one, they won't charge you the deposit. Make sure you are aware of this! It's quite a surprise for some when they are charged an extra 40$. Why they didn't make this a checkbox on their order form beats me! For the entire year, I was billed 227. I already had a modem. I also like prepaid billing... one less bill to worry about.
Of course, the only trouble I had was that I didn't receive the bill. 2 days later, I called technical support and they promptly emailed me my bill. I was also put on a 3Mbps profile, but my line stats were pretty good, so I called and asked to be put on a 5Mbps profile, which they did within minutes. Their technical support is very prompt (within a few hours) with responding to emails. The trouble is, on their website, they have this: "* If your service is down after hours please e-mail our emergency department. "
My question is, if your service is down, how exactly are you supposed to email their emergency department? Oh well... I usually sleep before their call support goes down (12am), so I don't desperately need the internet after midnight. So far (~4 months) I have not witnessed even a single DSL interruption. It's a good start.
By the way, some people say Acanac or DSL in general is slow... but it really depends on where you live. Where I live, I have great modem stats and can download at ~550kb/s (~4.5Mbps). Sure, doesn't beat Roger's speed, but I'm not paying 60$/m (after modem rental + taxes)! What is speed worth, if you only have a 60GB cap to play with anyway!?
Bell (who Acanac buys the bandwidth from) throttles torrents on weekdays, but on the weekends, it almost taps out my connection. Almost as good as NNTP. Of course, Acanac has been talking about offering NNTP. I will definitely stay with them after my promotional price increases to 34.95 if they offer it, no contest.
Overall, highly recommended. Especially over Rogers.
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Review by zang  Posted: 34 days ago member for 1.3 years, 5 visits, last login: 352 days ago
Toronto,ON
$47 per month (month by month)
about 7 days
"An alternative to the big ISPs, and are willing to stand up for net neutrality"
"Phone support was somewhat lacking for a while, though it's improved."
"I'm still with them, aren't I?"
| Pre Sales information: Install Co-ordination: Connection reliability: Tech Support: Services: Value for money: (ratings match consensus)
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I'm pretty happy with Acanac, and their introductory $19.95/month offer is pretty damn good for 5Mb service.
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