Telus → Optik tv questions

I am interested in optik tv, I am currently with bell, while with telus for internet. I am on telus 25.

It seems bell is giving up on the satellite division, my pvr can still only do 2 feeds. I love satellite but canada seems to have stalled in satellite department, while directv in america can do 5 feeds, and dish network has the hopper while bell seems to have no plans to roll that out.

So I would like to consider optik but i am scared, i am scared about my internet connection constantly being occupied with hd recordings due to us pvr'ing a lot. If i went with shaw (dont want to due to poor channel line up) i can save my speeds, but the poor line up is not worth it.

So I dont know where else to ask but for heavy hd pvr users and heavy internet users how is telus working? Any non telus employee feedback would be appreciated. I also have a few questions.

1. If i switch to telus 50 what is the spec for amount of shows i can record and watch in hd? Is it still 3?

2. If I get the extender it says it can pvr to if connected to the PVR, but how do you connect them? If i have to hook them together via cat 5 or something that wont work.

3. With the 50 plan how much is allocated to tv (max) and how much to internet?

I may have some other questions, but if anyone can help with the above 2 it would be appreciated, and if any current optik users would care to discuss on here how the system of sharing network speeds with tv and internet works for them, it would be appreciated, because its scaring me a bit right now. Especially for gaming.

I believe I can answer a few of your questions.

I have optik 50 in Edmonton and can shed some light.

My 50mbit allows me to have the following concurrent streams (this includes recording): 3 HD / 1 SD. The playback via PVR offered on my network is 2 HD 1 SD.

2. AFAIK, Coax is available for the extenders.

3. The bandwidth allotments by all appearances are separate. While recording 3 shows I've noticed no drop in my download speed over wireless (i get around 40mbit via wireless, 50 wired in)

Hope this helps.

3HD/1SD is the hard limit.

The PVR would be networked to the other STBs. So either coax or preferably ethernet.

When you're on Optik 50, you are allocated 76Mb of bandwidth. If you use all of your streams (3HD+1SD) that would use at max 21MB (6+6+6+3) leaving the remainder for your internet and some headroom.

We have Optik + 25 Mbit which will drop to about 10 Mbit if 3HD/1SD are all in use. This doesn't happen very often, and could be minimized with the timeshift bundle if desired.

The online games don't seem to be affected (World of Tanks, mostly) unless something else is gobbling bits, like unrestricted downloading or streaming simultaneous videos.

Most of the time we see at least 25 Mbits.

Hmmm so a single pvr can still only do 2 hd? And that only leaves 1 hd feed for the other?

Thats a bit disappointing right now unfortunately. Would you need two internet accounts to increase this?

The PVR can record three HD streams at once and that would leave one SD stream for a regular STB.

Thanks for the clarification, if/when we can do 4 HD i would probably be sold, I hardly ever watch SD anymore and neither does the family.

Is there any plans to do 4 hd on the 50 plan? I am not quite sure what is holding this back.

Hardware limitation of Mediaroom Middleware.

So if its hardware and I decided to rent two pvr's then could I get more hd feeds or is that also not possible?

Only 1 PVR would be active on one account. The other would just act as a regular STB.

No. We need a new version of Mediaroom to support more HD stream per STB.

I remember the software on the set top box is still running on Windows CE 5. Will it be upgraded to Windows CE 7?