 Review by urbanriot 
UPDATED: 150 days ago
member for 5.1 years, 1750 visits, last login: a few hours ago
 St Catharines,ON
 $99 per month (12 month contract)
 "Almost always available, 100+ day retension newgroup support, amazing speeds, and excellent support."
 "Strictly enforced bitcaps! Issues scheduling tech calls. Slower in dense, older infrastructure areas. Usage based billing."
 "Good ISP for casual browsers and email checkers. BAD for downloaders, unless they pay for the $100 business package."
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection Reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
(ratings above consensus)
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I've been using Cogeco's service since before their name was attached, for at least 11 years and I've typically had an all decent experience all throughout the Niagara Peninsula. The following encompasses my most recent four years with their service:
Cogeco has one serious, negative flaw:
- a strictly enforced, draconian bitcap of 100GB on a $70 a month pro account. What's the point of having 16 Mbps if you can only do 100 gigs in a month before you're locked out?
Cogeco has many positive points:
- excellent torrent downloading speeds, often reaching 1.6MBps on the download. There's some speculation that Cogeco is throttling P2P / torrent uploads, but I'm receiving decent speeds.
- excellent newsgroup support that's far better than any other ISP in our region; 6 day retention with subscription support for many binary groups.
- a strong team of employees that genuinely care about their users
- local knowledgable tech support that speak a clear and understandable English who are available 24/7
- a number of dedicated employees who take personal time to help people on broadband reports
- some highly motivated, dedicated and skilled on-site techs
Cogeco's negative points:
- in the past year, a number of profit making changes have been made to Cogeco which seriously disenfranchised them from their loyal and long term customer base
- inflexibility in scheduling on-site support calls outside of large cities
- a few on-site and contracted techs who aren't so skilled
- often the phone support personal are not aware of issues that they should be aware of, to better help customers often which result in...
- an inability to repair or diagnose issues that clearly exist outside your home and don't require service calls
- official documents have recently surfaced that Cogeco was throttling torrents since 2001, despite employees directly insisting that they were not utilizing such hardware. They now claim the hardware was used for monitoring and not throttling. It's unknown what the real truth is.
- Usage based billing if you go over your cap, which is ridiculously low.
Followup comments:  
DrDog
VIP
join:2006-07-28
Fort Erie, ON | on site techs have you had someone around other than me? I don't try and miss calls. If you are booked and in my lineup, you will get looked at | |
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urbanriot
join:2004-10-18
St Catharines, ON
 ·Cogeco Cable
| Re: on site techs I'd actually written the above long before you came out; previously I'd had horrible experiences with calls and scheduling. I had to leave for a family emergency for 10 mins once, and while I was on my way back, the guy couldn't wait when I was 2 mins away. The Cogeco representative told me, "Sorry, he's in a rush and can't wait." And I'm thinking, "what rush, if I wasn't there, he would have been working on my problem not rushing wherever he had to rush to."
I'll re-read and correct when I get home tonight, I'd hastily edited it to include my recent frustrations with the newly enforced bitcap so it might have some old review. | |
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urbanriot
join:2004-10-18
St Catharines, ON
·Cogeco Cable
| said by DrDog :have you had someone around other than me? I don't try and miss calls. If you are booked and in my lineup, you will get looked at Updated my review. No, you're one of Cogeco's best assets and it definitely wasn't directed at you. Unfortunately, I went through a few other people before you were able to fix things up and I might have kept my digital cable TV if the other guy was able to fix the picture dropouts last year. | |
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