Switching ISPs: Now with TekSavvy

[haggholm]

The motivation

Unhappy with my cable connection’s performance at various times, I looked around for a better ISP. I decided to go with TekSavvy, for a couple of reasons:

1. They offer a service I like at a good price. For the same price as I pay for my 7.5M down/512k up, I get 6M down/1M up with TekSavvy. Note that speed can be deceptive: Shaw is cable, and cable is shared with other nearby cable subscribers and tends to slow down during peak usage hours. The DSL line is all mine. And the upload speed is hugely greater, which is important to me—I never saturate a multi-megabit downlink, but when I backup large amounts of data or push data to my webserver, poor uplink speed is sometimes frustrating.

   Both my old Shaw service and my new TekSavvy service impose monthly total bandwidth caps. Shaw: 60 GB. TekSavvy: 200 GB. (In each case, GB, not Gb.)

2. TekSavvy does not throttle your traffic. In fact, they are actively lobbying advocates for net neutrality and so forth. This is of course in their own best interest as a lower-tier ISP (they rent lines from companies like Bell and Telus, and don’t want the line providers to throttle their traffic), but the fact remains that by buying service from TekSavvy, I am paying people who advocate for the openness and regulations I want.

   Shaw, of course, throttles traffic like torrents, and throttles small companies and consumer interests whenever they can.

3. I’ve used them before (in Québec), and left with an impression of good value for my money.

The service

I just got my DSL service, so it’s too early to comment on stuff like reliability (obviously I expect no problems—if I did, I wouldn’t have switched). The one minor thing worth remarking on is that as far as CNET’s bandwidth tester is concerned, my 6M DSL service is actually slightly (8.6%) faster than my 7.5M cable service—so don’t let that number scare you.

While I haven’t really tested this, so that it is subjective, I am surprised to find that my browsing feels much, much snappier than on the Shaw connection. I would guess that while the bandwidth is similar, my latency is much better.

The misadventures and the support

It is crucial to understand that TekSavvy is an internet service provider. They provide internet access. What they do not do is own, install, or manage the actual lines coming into anybody’s home. The lines are owned by the big telcos, like Bell or (as in my case) Telus. Any work on line installation is done by Telus agents. If you live in Vancouver (else substitute your local line provider as appropriate) sign up with a lower-tier ISP like TekSavvy, and you need DSL activated in your home, they will send a work order to Telus. Telus technicians activate it, Telus technicians may (or may not) visit your home.

It is perhaps interesting to note at this point that Telus also offers DSL service, so when they provide line service to TekSavvy customers, they are doing work for their direct competitor.

With the preliminaries out of the way, here’s a timeline:

• November 4: I place an order with TekSavvy. I receive a confirmation email telling me that my up to 6. Megabit dry copper loop residential DSL service is set to be tentatively activated on 11/11/2009 anywhere between the hours of 8am to Midnight, though warning me that my activation date could be delayed up to 10 business days due to unanticipated circumstances.

• November 5: I receive a phone call from TekSavvy. Because Telus has a worker shortage in BC, they—Telus—have delayed my scheduled activation date until December 7.

• November 6: I receive a phone call from TekSavvy. They misread something and the proper rescheduling date is December 1, not December 7.

• December 1: I work from home because Telus may need access to my apartment to test things. I don’t like to work from home as I am less productive, but do it—it’s just this once, after all. I see neither hide nor hair of any Telus technician, nor do I hear from them.

• December 3: I receive a phone call from Telus informing me that my DSL service has been activated. No explanation is given as to why it was delayed past the (already postponed) scheduled date.

• December 4: I spend a lot of time on the phone with TekSavvy support. My ADSL router came with some weird factory settings, so it takes some resetting and configuring before the real problem emerges: TekSavvy and Telus use different DSL authentication mechanisms (or some similar DSL jargon), and the Telus techs configured my line for Telus DSL service, not TekSavvy. TekSavvy can do nothing but file a ticket with Telus, and since Telus support works Monday through Friday, 8 am to 8 pm (unlike TekSavvy’s 24/7), I will have to wait until after the weekend to see any change.

  Note: Router settings are not TekSavvy’s fault, since I bought my own DSL modem/router rather than getting one from them. All the same, they did help me troubleshoot it, even though it was not one of their recommended/official models, so point to them.

• December 7: Wonder of wonders! The DSL connection works! Unfortunately, the line rate is not what I’m paying for, just 1536 kbps down/637 up. (Note: Line rate, not measured connection rate.) It should be about 6000/1000. I call TekSavvy support again. I’m told that this is another configuration error by the Telus techs—one they make pretty often. Once again, it’s not within the power of an ISP to fix this; has to be done by the company running the lines. Another ticket to Telus.

• December 8: It works! I actually have the line rate I’m paying for!

Obviously, this was all a bit of a pain in the arse.

Note that apart from a minor error (a misreading that affected nothing and was quickly corrected), it appears that all of this was the fault not of TekSavvy, but of Telus. I gather that my case was atypically difficult by quite a wide margin, but I can’t help but wonder if Telus are just not very interested in making things easy on customers of their competitors, regulations be damned…

On the other hand, TekSavvy support was wonderful. When I called for help (which, as mentioned, is available 24/7),

1. I spoke to competent technicians. TekSavvy does not bother with a call centre full of support staff reading from scripts. Their tech support consists of people who actually understand technical issues.

2. I was not feel condescended or talked down to. This is a huge deal to me, as I am very sensitive to it, and as my technical expertise makes a lot of the support scripts many companies use sound like baby talk. The TekSavvy guys, of course, stepped me through the bits I was clueless about, but passed briefly over the parts it was clear I knew. This requires respect for the customer’s intelligence when any is exhibited, and it requires competence (a support monkey reading a script but lacking actual technical expertise can’t possibly judge mine, and won’t know how to address problems in a manner not dictated by the script).

   This alone would make me happy to recommend TekSavvy. I usually find tech support calls a frustrating and sometimes enraging experience. Here, in spite of the annoying frequency of issues caused by Telus, it was more like friendly banter with people I could relate to.

3. They called to follow up on every issue. They didn’t have the power to directly address a lot of the problems, as they had to go through Telus, but they did make sure that I was kept in the loop as things progressed.

Conclusion

Based on my experiences thus far, I’m happy to recommend TekSavvy. The service itself seems good, the tech support is excellent, and the company supports openness and net neutrality rather than consumer-crushing and unethical business practices. I’m happy to give my money to these guys.

I had a huge delay and numerous issues in getting the service working, but as far as I can tell, all of them were due to Telus, and I wouldn’t want TekSavvy to suffer for that. And, of course, odds are pretty good that you won’t be hit with every Telus fuckup in the book, like I was.

The only remaining items on my ISP agenda is to buy a longer phone cord so I can move the modem to where I want it, and to cancel my Shaw subscription.

Comments

Teksavvy

[(Anonymous)]

I found this entry via google. I found it very informative. I am also thinking about switching and was wondering if you were still happy with their service since righting this? Also, did you go with their modem or did you purchase your own? Any suggestions with this?

Re: Teksavvy

[petter-haggholm.livejournal.com]

Glad to hear it was useful!

I have nothing but good things to say about TekSavvy—I’ve only had to call them twice since I signed up (once to move; once for something that turned out to be mostly my fault, albeit a very obscure one), and the service has remained stellar. Call them 24/7 and you’ll talk to an actual, competent, knowledgeable, helpful technician instead of a minimum wage worker with a dumb script. (I don’t recall having any service outages or slowdowns, so: again, nothing to complain about.)

Of course, with the recent passage of the bill that allows Bell, Telus, et al to charge usage-based billing to third-tier ISPs, it’s hard to say what the billing situation will develop into over the next few years.

I bought my own modem/router, because I wanted one that was both a DSL modem and a wifi router, and supported a bunch of slightly unusual configuration: MAC-based port forwarding of SSH, for instance. I’m sure theirs is fine for regular usage, but I wanted to buy one that I knew would support what I needed to do.