I recently made the jump to TekSavvy for the internet and wanted to share my experiences about the whole transition.  Now I’m not new to TekSavvy, we had at 2 different times had them as our service provider for DSL. Originally we had them when we rented a place in Cambridge.  We were quite happy with their service, but subsequently had to cancel when we moved to Clyde, an area that DSL service was unavailable.  When we did move back to Cambridge I jumped at the opportunity to sign back up with them.  Unfortunately for us we discovered our new house was in a bad DSL zone, where we at max received 2.5mb service, even though we were paying for 5mb.  This was when we unfortunately had to make the jump to Rogers cable internet, as 2.5mb service was really insufficient to run VOIP phone service.  That was back in 2009.

Recently I discovered that TekSavvy was now offering cable internet in the region and was quite excited about the opportunity to jump away from Rogers.  Now my issue with Rogers was never the service, it was more the constraints Rogers put on its services.  As people who don’t have cable we do a lot of online streaming and we were hitting our heads on the 60gb cap Rogers imposed. I was always mindful of it and made sure not to go over, often rationing bandwidth towards the end of our billing cycle.  So when I discovered TekSavvy could offer me faster internet, more upload and download bandwidth, a 300gb usage cap and save $13 a month off of my bill as compared to Rogers, I was sold.

The thing I discovered when switching was that it wasn’t very easy to coordinate a seamless transition from Rogers to TekSavvy. First I tried to align the shutoff day to be close to the end of my billing cycle with Rogers. TekSavvy required at minimum at 7 day window before it could activate the service. This in and of itself cost me 2 months before being able to switch, as I managed to miss setting up the window in time to align with my Rogers billing cycle.  So finally in July I contacted TekSavvy, arranged a date to service activation and set the gears in motion. This was a misstep on my part. I then called Rogers and discovered that they need a months notice for any cancellations.  I was mightily ticked about this, but there wasn’t much I could do about it.

So Sunday, August 7th rolls around and Rogers finally turns off the service, which then allows TekSavvy to use the line. I try hooking up a modem I already owned and had used a few years before and discover it doesn’t want to work with TekSavvy.  I went through all the troubleshooting steps with TekSavvy and the conclusion is it’s kaput. So now I need a new modem. As I’m cheap and refuse to pay $80-100+ for a modem, I purchased one on eBay for $35 from a guy in Mississauga.  I’m told by TekSavvy that they need 48 hours to activate a new modem on their system, so now I have to wait until the modem is delivered, then give them the info, then there would be 2 whole days before we could have internet.  The modem arrives Thursday and I call TekSavvy immediately to relay the info so they can get the process started. I wait patiently until 6pm on Saturday.

The modem itself is a refurbed Rogers modem, so the process was that they needed to request that Rogers release the modem so that TekSavvy could use it.  So 6pm on Saturday comes and goes and we still don’t have a working modem. This is when things start to go off the rails for me. We’ve now been without internet for a week and have been patient and courteous to this point. I phone TekSavvy and the rep tells me that the ticket was apparently never pushed over to Rogers, so even though I called on Thursday, no progress has been made.  Upon finding this I manage to stay relatively calm and let them sort it out.  I wait another 24 hours and call again. I talk to another rep who looks into it and I am told again that the ticket wasn’t pushed over to Rogers and that we’re still at square one.  I’m pretty livid at this point and send an email to support about this issue and ask someone to actually take responsibility for this issue instead of passing the buck and nothing getting done.  I finally get someone to tell me that Rogers will activate it between 9am and 12am on Monday.

Finally on Monday evening at around 9pm my modem roars to life and we have internet again. After 8 days without service my wife and I are just happy to finally have internet back and to hopefully put this whole pain in the ass behind us.

The first thing I do, because I’m a geek and all, is head to SpeedTest.net and see what type of speed we were getting. The package we signed up for was 15mb down/ 1mb up/ 300gb cap for $42.99. Upon testing I discover we were actually getting 22mb down which was pretty awesome. With all the grief we had to go through it looked like it was all going to be worth it.

Fast forward 2 weeks later.  Sunday at 6pm the internet and cable goes out. While we didn’t subscribe to cable, a few local channels still came through on the line, so those were now gone along with the internet. Initially we think it might just be an outage, so we wait until Monday to take action. I call TekSavvy support again and get walked through the idiot’s guide to internet troubleshooting.  They’re trying to troubleshoot issues with my modem and router, when it seems pretty apparent since the TV wasn’t working that the whole cable line had been disconnected.  This didn’t really shock me as another recent TekSavvy switcher, Dawn Wentzell, had the same problem.  The best TekSavvy could do was arrange a Rogers tech to come and check it out and see what’s wrong. The earliest they could book a time was Wednesday, so I gave them an option of Wednesday or Thursday to come after 5.  Teksavvy calls me on Wednesday to inform me the best Rogers could do is next Monday.

At this point I am again furious with the whole situation. I write a nasty email to TekSavvy again outlining how it’s unacceptable to be disconnected for over a week.  But this time I decided to see if I could sort things out on my own account and not be bothered with Rogers or TekSavvy. I remembered I had a friend from high school who worked for a local Rogers subcontractor.  While feeling awful about asking a favour after not seeing him in close to a year, I outline what my situation was and ask if he could help me out.   Less than an hour later there is a truck out front of my house and someone digging through the Rogers box on my neighbours yard and a few minutes later we had internet again.

About 10 minutes later we get a phone call and our friend explained what probably happened.  Apparently when you cancel service with Rogers they deactivate the line from there end, but usually it will be 2 or 3 weeks later they will send someone around to physically disconnect the service. This is pretty common, as I’m sure many people who have moved into a new house and discovered cable still connected even though the previous tenants had moved out.  So with his company, it could very well be his guys disconnecting the service last week, and just as likely for his guys to reconnect it when they were supposed to come Monday.

The part that drives me nuts about this whole thing is how TekSavvy and Rogers don’t have any system for avoiding this from happening.  I told Rogers I was going to TekSavvy, yet this still happened, and as can be seen with it happening to Dawn too, it isn’t a rare occurrence.  Obviously I was able to expedite the reactivation process by having connections, but how many people out there are waiting a week for Rogers to finally get around to doing things?  This is the type of stuff the CRTC needs to crack down on.  Rogers will very deliberately sabotage my service with TekSavvy, then when asked to rectify the problem will put it at the bottom of their queue when it comes to service calls. And we wonder why providers outside of Rogers/Bell/Telus/Shaw can’t gain a strong foothold in the market?  It’s this type of garbage.

While I’ve obviously written a longwinded blog about this whole topic, I really don’t begrudge TekSavvy.  Sure their customer service hasn’t necessarily been top rate along the way, but when their service has functioned its been awesome.  And with Rogers seemingly doing everything in their power to screw over TekSavvy, I have to wonder how much undue strain that puts on their support system. What happened to me in the last week was 100% preventable and really just served to make me use their support system unnecessarily.  I just hope my story will help others along the way and can help them avoid some of the pitfalls I’ve encountered.  People need a choice that isn’t Rogers or Bell and TekSavvy is really trying to provide that.

Things are about to get interesting in the mobile phone market in the next couple of months. Industry Minister Tony Clement disclosed today that he would be overruling the CRTCs decision to not allow Globalive to operate in Canada. The CRTC had ruled in September that the company did not meet the Canadian ownership requirements, a ruling that was heavily influenced by the incumbent mobile carriers Rogers, Bell and Telus.

This could viably be great news for Canadians as we finally have a new competitor to stir the pot in an otherwise stagnant market. The Canadian mobile phone market is what I would call “duopoly” in much of the country. Sure we have 3 big providers, but when you boil it down any choice to be made when picking a mobile provider, Rogers or Bell. Telus’ stronghold is in the West, so they don’t quite stack up to the top 2 companies. The problem with this duopoly is that there is little to no competing going on. Both of these companies are more then willing to pad their fat bottom lines instead of actually compete.

Just look at the recently launched iPhone on Bell and Telus. While it heralded a new day for choice of iPhone providers in Canada, it offered little to no incentive to consumers looking for a break on phone and data plan pricing. All 3 companies were more then content to just have the hottest handset on the market instead of actually competing for customers.

It is the hope that Globalive and their Wind Mobile brand will breathe some new life into a very stagnant market place. Canada is drastically lagging behind other countries when it comes to the cost of running a smartphone. With Vodaphone in the UK I can get a phone plan with 500megs of data for less then $35 CDN, taxes in. In Canada a plan like that is practically unfathomable. And

We can hope that Globalive is able to stir the pot a bit and actually able to bring competitive phone and data rates to Canada. Globalive is backed by telecom giant T-Mobile, so this isn’t a company that is coming into the market as nobodies. And if this leaked info from May is anywhere close to true, Canadians might finally have a true alternative to Bell and Rogers.

I signed up for the new beta of the new Rogers on demand service yesterday morning to see what all the hub-bub was about. I had heard some buzz starting last week that Rogers was launching a Hulu type service available to Rogers customers. I got excited as I’m a Rogers phone and Internet customer, so I figured this would be pretty awesome. Canada has long been tailing behind the US in our ability to watch TV content streaming online for free. If you’re like me and expected Hulu for Canadians, then you’re in for some disappointment.

Rogers On Demand beta service

Content
Rogers has built a website on the same platform on which Hulu was created, but that seems to be about where the similarities ends. Since this is a beta the content is limited pretty much to Rogers properties(CityTV, Sportsnet, G4), mixed with a smattering of Canwest Global(Slice, Food Network) and Corus Entertainment(YTV, Treehouse) channels mixed in as well. Aside from the stuff from CityTV, there really isn’t any big network shows available on the site. There are a smattering of full length movies as well.  I don’t want to bag on the content since the service just launched yesterday, but knowing how the Canadian content providers are at odds with each other, I’m not holding my breath on whether the channel selection will get better.

Tiered system online
Where things really go off the rails is when you try to access content from channels you don’t subscribe to. As a non-cable subscriber, I have access to very little of the content on the site. If I want to watch an episode of Slice’s Til Debt Do Us Part or any Sportnet content, I’m out of luck with RoD. I can go to the Slice.ca and watch every episode from season 1 – 8 for free, but I can’t watch the 3 old episodes available on RoD because I don’t subscribe to that channel. To me this is essentially Rogers attempting to create a tiered “cable television 2″ online.

As a person who has abandoned cable and satellite in lieu of paying for loads of crap I’ll never watch, you would figure Rogers would be trying to court people like myself to use their service.  Maybe their intent is to simply create a value added service for their cable customers, but if that’s the case, don’t compare the service to Hulu. Hulu is probably the one thing that the MPAA and television networks have done right when it comes to bringing their content to the world. Content providers actually working together to provide a valuable service to end users in an easy to use format.

What Rogers has built is essentially a platform meant to exclude satellite subscribers and those who don’t subscribe to either service. 6 months down the line we’ll probably have a similar website for Bell Expressvu, which will only compound the problem as Bell will keep all the CTV content and this will become the next frontier of the Rogers versus Bell battle in Canada.

To Canadians this has to be frustrating. Rogers seems to have a reasonable start with this website, built using a proven technology. The site is usable, aside from the horrible navigation. The video that is available is pretty good quality.  I have often heard the refrain of Canadian users about being envious of US only Hulu site and we’ve now waited over 2 years to get something similar.  Ideally Canadians deserve better.  Guess we’re back to waiting for hulu.ca.

Ever since the iPhone was released, along with the iPod before it, it seems companies have constantly released devices that have been labeled as Apple “killers”. Devices that aim to finally knock Apple off their pedestal as market leader. To date there has yet to be an “iPhone killer”, yet that doesn’t stop the media from ramping up the hype for the next upcoming device.

I was recently at a monthly meetup of designers and developers in Waterloo and a representative from RIM was there presenting on the merits of the Blackberry as a development platform. At one point during his presentation he mentioned how Apple was very good at articulating what they are good at, yet Blackberry does a crappy job of this very thing. To me this isn’t something that is exclusively the realm of Blackberry. Pretty much every smartphone manufacturer has the same problem when competing with Apple.

After seeing this new Verizon commercial yesterday, this served as a perfect example of what handset manufacturers are doing wrong. It’s a quaint and clever concept that I’m sure Verizon paid a boatload to get the rights to using the Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer characters. But after watching that video, what handset got the most facetime in that commercial? While it wasn’t the actual iPhone in the commercial, the viewer saw Verizon’s iPhone stand-in on screen for 20 seconds of a 30 second spot. The Verizon handsets only show up between 23 seconds and 28 seconds of the video. So 66% of the commercial featured the iPhone, and 10% was spent talking about the products they sell, then the other 24% spent talking about Verizon and their network.
Message: The iPhone is useless because AT&T has a crappy network. Verizon has an awesome network. Buy this Windows phone, or buy this Google Android phone.

Contrast that ad with an Apple ad selling the iPhone. Nothing but the phone and its function are shown for the first 23 seconds. 1 second devoted to app store logos, 2 seconds for iPhone logo, 2 seconds for carrier logo and 2 seconds for Apple logo. So 76.6% of the commercial was devoted to showing the product and 23.3% was used for the of branding various partners. Apple didn’t once mention verbally the network or the carrier.
Message: Look at all the cool stuff you can do with your iPhone

Can you see the disconnect here? A new device like the HTC Droid hits the market within the last 2 weeks. It’s supposed to be a real contender to the iPhone throne. Yet the handset is relegated to 2.5 seconds of face time in this Verizon commercial. Do we know anything that the device is capable of? About the only info you get is what smartphone OS the phone is running and the price. Apparently the only reason to get one of these 2 phones Verizon is offering is because their network is better.

Apple’s device has been on the market for over 2 years now, yet Apple focuses on the positive. They show you what cool things the iPhone empowers you to do. They maximize the amount of time you see the product on screen and keep the message simple and on point. The carrier is an afterthought.

This is where Apple has diverged from all other handset providers. They control how the iPhone is sold and marketed. They don’t allow it to be lumped in with a bunch of other similar looking phones in the carriers marketing. Essentially they are selling a phone, they don’t care about the network or the carrier, they allow their product to sell itself instead.

When talking to the RIM rep I commented to him about Apple’s carrier relationship and marketing contrasted with how Blackberry and the rest of the smartphone makers. He mentioned that BB spends a lot of time managing and working their partnerships with carriers, helping them implement things like carrier branded app stores. While I’m sure they do great business together, Apple has done it differently. They only need the carrier for their network and retails sales channels. Apple handles pretty much everything else. The carrier is an afterthought.

You would figure that Apple’s way of doing business would have carriers running the opposite way, yet as seen in Canada recently, nothing could be further from the truth. Bell and Telus, after losing large chunks of marketshare to Rogers and their exclusive iPhone arrangement, spent billions of dollars to build an HSPA+ network in part to accommodate the iPhone. Now that Rogers exclusivity agreement with Apple is over rivals Bell and Telus will also be offering the iPhone as well. This after Bell spent the summer mocking the iPhone in their Palm Pre ads. It will be curious to see how Bell and Telus will market the iPhone, given Apple controls the advertising and they won’t be able to play the my networks better then your network card against Rogers.

Handset manufacturers will never create this “iPhone killer” if their device is always playing second fiddle to the carrier.  By allowing the carrier to handle promotion of their devices they are shooting themselves in the foot with every new handset they release.  While Apple’s iPhone stays in the spotlight, the latest RIM, Motorola, Palm or Samsung device just becomes part of the crowd because carriers don’t market one smartphone any differently then they do the others in their lineup.

It’s been about 6 months since my wife and I decided to go cable free after moving to our new house.  At first it was an experiment to see how we’d fare without the $60 cable bill.  After 6 months I’m to the point I would question why I would ever go back to subscribing to cable.

We are currently subscribing to Rogers Express service, which allots us 10mb service with a 60GB download cap.  The bonus to having Rogers internet without having cable is the fact that we actually do get a handful of channels, as Rogers is unable to shut off all of the channels and provide us with internet.  We get Global, CTV, CBC and Omni 1 and 2, along with a smattering of other channels.  This is great since much of the syndicated primetime shows appear on Global or CTV in Canada anyways.  Then we’re just left to fill in the gaps.

Our current setup in the house has a HTPC Hackintosh setup in the living room, then an Xbox running XBMC in the bedroom.  When I want to watch something on live TV that isn’t on our TV, I typically turn to Justin.tv.  Quite often you can find a live stream of popular shows just by searching their listings.  I find this is pretty indispensable for live sporting events.  Even if I had cable I would rarely be able to catch Senators or 49ers games because I live outside their broadcast market.  You have to pay for $250 packages like Centre Ice or Sunday Ticket, and even then you’re paying for tonnes of games you’ll never watch.  The football season has started and I’ve probably watched more 49er games this season then I have in the last 2 combined, even with the ability to timeshift and watch west coast NFL broadcasts.  No more suffering through Buffalo Bills games anymore for me.

If you want to watch episodes of shows that have already aired, you can’t really go wrong with a site like SurfTheChannel.  You can pretty much watch back episodes of pretty much every show on television.  There are also quite a few sites out there that allow you to stream DVD quality movies too, many of which are still in theatres.  Watch Movie Links has all sorts new releases, ready to watch.  No downloading or anything which is pretty sweet.  I think my favourite for doing this is NinjaVideo, always has quality streams and is organized really nicely.  They even have every documentary you might ever want to see which is awesome for those who might miss content from channels like Discovery or National Geographic.

The compromise to using online feeds is that you can’t always count on great quality for these feeds.  Some of them are fantastic, others are pretty crummy.  Going cable free isn’t for everyone, as sometimes it does require patience to find what you are looking for online.  But once you get used to how to use online streaming there are a world of options as to what to watch online.  I find nowadays I watch TV I actually want to see instead of being tied to TV schedules and whatever garbage might be on right now.   Not spending $60 a month on cable has been a great decision for us.