TekSavvy Solutions Inc. is probably the worst "ISP" (read: glorified reseller) I've ever had to deal with. Granted, Canada doesn't have a lot of options ... and I left Rogers to try TekSavvy, mostly due to their better rates and bandwidth options. I have been with TekSavvy since Jan. 2011, using their cable Internet service (via Rogers).

Here are the things I've had to put up with:

1. Being disconnected twice, for days - who knows why? Best guess: Rogers conducts audits on their connections, and when I wasn't a "Rogers" customer anymore (or, rather, a Rogers customer who pays TekSavvy), they disconnected my cable because I wasn't on the Rogers list of customers.

2. Two months of extremely poor Internet connection, because TekSavvy oversubscribed their services. Who did they blame? Rogers. After telling them several times what a breach of service this was, they finally gave me a small credit.

3. When you call TekSavvy, be prepared to wait on the phone for hours. When you finally do talk to someone, if they say they will call you back, they won't. I decided that was useless. Luckily, you can also reach them through DSLReports. Support isn't much better, but at least someone will answer you and you don't have to waste quite as much time.

4. Two to three months of intermittent Internet service (ongoing) - works fine during the day, but between midnight and 7 a.m. it's basically gone. Best guess? Rogers is doing maintenance in my area. TekSavvy can't give me any clear reasons why this is happening, and several tickets opened with Rogers to find out why come back as "no problem". Of course, no support is actually available during that time frame to check what the problem is ... let's put 2 and 2 together, shall we?

5. Support is pretty much useless (see above). Most of the time, after power cycling your modem and resetting it to factory default, and asking you to spend hours gathering logs (which most people would really have no clue how to do without an IT background), they will have to pass things on to Rogers. Alright, understandable - but here's where things get good... they have to e-mail Rogers, and you have to wait up to 2 days to hear back from them to see if Rogers will do anything about it. Most of the time, Rogers will come back with "no problem found". If you dispute this, guess what? TekSavvy will gladly ask you to waste a bunch of time reproducing the same logs, and will open another ticket with Rogers ... which will, of course, rinse and repeat the above.

I guess the old adage holds true... you get what you pay for.

Exactly. Some of these complaints boil down to "I dislike reality and demand that TekSavvy ignore it." Rogers' obnoxious rules and delays are (gasp!) Rogers' fault. TSI can only try to be as helpful as possible within a difficult system.

As I've said before ... to raise a problem to Rogers, and to avoid you getting a DMC charge, they have to ask all the dumb questions that a lot of the Rogers support people would ask. And believe me, I've been through this same pain with Rogers. Please power down your modem, please power up your modem. Please unplug the power to the modem. Please disconnect the router. Please try a new network cable. Please try a new coax cable. Please scratch your left ear in a breeze from the north on a warm winter's day.

If TSI doesn't go through this painful checking and report that they've done it to Rogers, then Rogers will bounce the request back "Have customer replace cables" for example and that goes through another 48 hour delay.

If TSI doesn't do this, the delays created by the support process are just interminable. As much as they are dumb things, if they didn't ask, you'd be SO pissed off at the delays it would be far worse!

I just wanted to elaborate on my experience so far since quality of support has been heavily discussed and criticized in this thread.

I was given a pretty technically heavy set of questions and details to provide by support int he direct forum. Being in the IT industry myself, I'm OK with that, appreciate the level of detail and answering it all was easy enough for me, but I hope what was copy/pasted to me to answer isn't what they give the average person. I'm not sure how they can simplify or make it better but asking an average person to collect data on signal strength, MAC addresses, logs, splitter setup, firmware ect would be a nightmare for them. I'm imagining my Mom or Dad being hit with those kind of questions, not having a clue what any of it means and thinking they were getting terrible support as a result.

Some of it was kind of aimless and redundant as well, for example, asking me to try another coax cable when the connection is fine %99 of the time until it drops and resetting the modem results in it running fine again. Asking me if the modem is in standby or to do a factory reset when those options don't even exist on my modem struck me as odd as well. Asking me for my Modem serial and MAC when they already have my OID and customer info. Do they not keep any record of any of this themselves?

Let me clarify, i'm not knocking support, becuase I think their intentions are in the right place, and the response has been quick so far, but the method seem like it'd be nuts for anyone who isn't educated and experienced with computers and networking.

Generally I've found the server side line quality functions from DSLR next to useless for any ISP that's too far away. There are just too many things enroute that can impact the connection quality.

Been lurking this thread and it got me wondering as i've had some weird late night intermittent connection issues lately which I've solved with a modem reset when it has happened. I setup a monitor yesterday and check out what happened around the same time OP reports having issues. I woke up this morning and came straight to work and didn't use my internet so it'll probably be down all day until I go home and reset my modem.

»ny-monitor.dslreports.com/r3/cri···and=5215

Been lurking this thread and it got me wondering as i've had some weird late night intermittent connection issues lately which I've solved with a modem reset when it has happened. I setup a monitor yesterday and check out what happened around the same time OP reports having issues. I woke up this morning and came straight to work and didn't use my internet so it'll probably be down all day until I go home and reset my modem.

»ny-monitor.dslreports.com/r3/cri···and=5215

I think you guys are not reading Andre's comments the way they were intended. I don't take them at all as slagging Rocky, but that Marc redirected some company focus which has been a good thing. Remember too that they were / are joint owners.

It's just TSI Andre comes in here and slags R0CKY and TSI Andre might be right but the way the post came out, it certainly didn't come out good in fact to me, it sounded negative.

While Andre slags Rocky I can tell you this. If Rocky were to start another ISP tomorrow you would see people move to him fast.

People bought Rocky, his dream, his belief, his stance. People didn't buy TSI internet. He has a big following just by name.

Would be interesting...

This isn't the right solution to this problem.

We've been doing network outage notices for ages...

If you want to know what's going on, you can call in as we always update the IVR, you can see the web site, we always post here on dslr also... we're on twitter.. before the teksavvynetwork handle was created we did it on one of the other handles.

Get a few TSI regulars on the board to join the monitoring group which would provide a steady stream of pings in different areas.

It's simple really and it's that UBB is far from gone...

that's very fair. mostly I feel that everybody is supportive and honestly voicing their opinions and thoughts.. as I'm doing too.. so it's all good. It's raw and it's real that way. I like that.

that's very fair. mostly I feel that everybody is supportive and honestly voicing their opinions and thoughts.. as I'm doing too.. so it's all good. It's raw and it's real that way. I like that.

I think most knowledgeable customers appreciate TSI's position and effort Marc.

like... how much more can we possibly put it out there? It's almost like you guys are spoiled and you dont even know it anymore.

Throughout the past two months of troubleshooting my issue with TekSavvy, they requested I submit various logs to them, including ping, tracert, etc. Each time, gathering those logs took me approx. 45 mins. or longer. I am well-versed on how to run these DOS commands and gather the logs. If this is what TekSavvy requires to open tickets with Rogers for support, all of this could have been automated.

+1 ... announcements like this and others will a) show they know what's going on, and b) prevent a lot of wasted time troubleshooting, etc. Granted, power is a lot simpler to troubleshoot than your ISP connection, but TekSavvy needs to work towards that kind of knowledge of their customers' connections (at least from the network side).

I also agree with this. Communication is always key. I think the problem though is that the general public thought just because UBB is gone all our internet problems are solved. So yeah, there needs to be another uprising of sorts, rioting is a little extreme IMHO.

Only people that know such a tool would be tech savvy people... And if the Internet is down, how do they expect us to get onto the Internet....

Ironically, Rogers was down this week. We weren't.

+1

Was this announced to customers in any way? This is the first time I've heard any network status announcements were available.

I see the Twitter account was only created earlier this month. I think separating tweets (or RSS) in some fashion would be helpful. I'm not all that interested in what happens outside of my area of service, and with services I don't subscribe to, other than to perhaps periodically check what TSI is dealing with.