Canadian ISP that appears not to suck

A friend of a friend recently moved to Canada and set out to find a good, clean, unfiltered, high-speed Internet connection that he could use to shift a gigabit every day to his office in Europe. He asked me about ISPs, and I couldn't help him, because Rogers and Bell are so onerous and sneaky and terrible (it's one of the reasons I won't consider moving home to Canada -- this is my living, I can't have it at the mercy of those awful companies). Bell, in particular, has a deal whereby they undermine the quality of the Internet connections for all the other ISPs that buy lines from them.

But here's good news -- this person found a DSL company called "Teksavvy," a Bell reseller that has figured out how to beat Bell's network-confounding shenanigans:

After a month using a Teksavvy line, I must say I'm pretty happy.

The bandwidth cost is what is is, but they do have very interesting specificity: Multilink PPP is enabled on all their servers. This means I could buy a second line from these guys, and double my bandwidth. Or a third line, etc.

But here's the biggest benefit of MLPPP : For their P2P throttling, Telus (or Bell, depending on what Province you're in), who owns the lines, relies on Deep Packet Inspection. If I understand correctly, using MLPPP offsets packet-headers by a few bits, making them impossible to inspect with the regular system. Telus and Bell could fix this, but they have not made their move yet, and it's already been more than a year since people found out about that well-documented trick.

And here comes the happy ending : MLPPP can even be used with a single line. All you need is the Tomato/MLPPP firmware (http://fixppp.org/) and a compliant router (ie: Linksys WRT54GL).

I'm using it, and it works just fine. That said, compared to the free.fr line I had in Paris, I still feel very constricted. But it's still much more comfortable than the combination of monthly

Teksavvy (Thanks, Louis!)

[#1 posted by zuzu, February 9, 2009 1:18 PM]

The technique is often called bonding or link aggregation.

Which sounds a lot like using any dual-WAN router with any two (or more) upstream providers.

Looking forward to DD-WRT support for MLPPP though.

c.f. iproute2

[#2 posted by Anonymous, February 9, 2009 1:27 PM]

I use teksavvy in bc. I like it a lot compared to any of the other available providers. Their support line has real people that pick up right away and actually help you. (If they can, it seems like most of their customers are back east and the main problem on the west is that they have to deal with Telus to resolve your issues) Telus sucks and they know this.

[#3 posted by plorry, February 9, 2009 1:33 PM]

Here's a couple more with comparable pricing:

http://www.montreal-dsl.com/dry-dsl.php

and

http://acanac.ca/DSL.html (with a pretty wicked-looking intro rate)

I always try to talk people out of the Rogers/Bell duopoly. People think there are only the two options. And Rogers and Bell want you to think there's only two options.
I like owning my own GD modem - not paying obligatory monthly rental fees for one of theirs.

[#4 posted by Antinous / Moderator, February 9, 2009 1:36 PM]

The problem with ISPs that don't suck is that they tend to get bought by bigger ISPs that do suck.

[#5 posted by k386, February 9, 2009 1:46 PM]

Doesn't look like they are in Toronto, or at least in the west end. I tried a few numbers, and no service provided.

Balls.

Which is simultaneously where i want to the CEOs and my reaction on said seeming discovery.

[#6 posted by plorry, February 9, 2009 1:48 PM]

@ #5
Check out mah post #3 - both of them guys are available in Toronto.

[#7 posted by anaximander, February 9, 2009 1:51 PM]

@ #5 - They are - I've got several friends using them from Etobicoke to the Bloor/Dundas area. Although in one house it drops CONSTANTLY due to one issue in the line bell doesn't seem willing to fix.

[#8 posted by JT Montreal, February 9, 2009 1:52 PM]

@#3:Plorry, I'm with Montreal DSL, they are actually resellers of Teksavvy. When I called tech support one time, I got through to the Teksavvy network guys pretty quick and they didn't do any stupid "please reboot your Windows..." kind of support, it was a real, honest network tech. (turned out one of their authentication servers was down, and I was one of the first people to notice)

I highly recommend them. I even switched my parents DSL and local phone over to them from H^HBell.

(I don't know about acanac, but they may be resellers as well. Not a given though, there is a reasonable amount of independent DSL providers though the last-mile lines are still run by Bell Nexxia)

[#9 posted by Jeff, February 9, 2009 1:55 PM]

Cory, I think there are a lot of very good reasons to move back to Canada.

[#10 posted by burningrome, February 9, 2009 1:57 PM]

I'm using Teksavvy and I'm in the west end, a couple of hundred meters west of High Park. Much better than Bell/Sympatico, and I'm not even using the MLPPP stuff yet.

[#11 posted by k386, February 9, 2009 2:11 PM]

@ #7 Well Bloor/Dundas is the hood i'm in.
Is that the place with the conneciton problems?

[#12 posted by ashground, February 9, 2009 2:11 PM]

In Manitoba, your only real choice is MTS. Their customer service is horrible, their equipment is out of date, but their speeds are decent, they don't throttle, and none of their plans have bandwidth caps. I guess that's all you can really ask for.

[#13 posted by AlanJCastonguay, February 9, 2009 2:23 PM]

I'm a customer of MNSi, who operates in Ontario from Windsor to the GTA. They use their own DSLAMs where possible, which is not affected by Bell's desire to throttle traffic.

[#14 posted by subrosa, February 9, 2009 2:30 PM]

I'm with acanac, and very happy with their service. Although they do buy wholesale from Bell, Acanac was very helpful setting me up with (I might get this wrong) a free online PC and ssh tunnel to connect to it and thus bypass the throttle. I definitely had to learn a few things to get it up and running, but I'm (slightly) more tech savvy for it.
Also, it's cheap and fast and unlimited. Or maybe I just think it's fast because I'm used to the Canadian 'market' *cough, doupoly.

[#15 posted by Anonymous, February 9, 2009 2:39 PM]

I'm a teksavvy customer in Ontario. They mostly stay out of my hair and let me be. Once when I was running a Tor server to test it, someone ran Bittorrent through my node making it look like I was the person downloading a Wii game in Japanese.

Their provider in the US sent them a DMCA take-down, so they notified me, accepted my complaints intelligently, and then changed my static IP to get around the take-down.

It's all bullshit, but they did what they had to to stay in business.

The multi-link might be worth investigating. I forget what sort of router I have.

One thing: my DSL is not "fast" though they keep upgrading my service. The asymmetric in ADSL seems to be pretty loose, and sometimes we get brutal pings even to my local office. Getting ti Europe or beyond sucks, but I blame the two loser ISPs in the US that own all the hops across the Atlantic.

[#16 posted by arborman, February 9, 2009 2:48 PM]

I've been with Telus forever. Recently I've noticed that within 1 minute of starting a Bit Torrent program everything grinds down to a near (but not quite) halt. Fine when I leave the machine on to download something I guess, but annoying. Certainly no web browsing while downloading a torrent. At first I thought it was my PC, but it isn't - I am getting throttled.

I have to reboot to get any kind of decent speed online again. Shortly, I'll be checking out another ISP - maybe teksavvy.

[#17 posted by Anonymous, February 9, 2009 3:28 PM]

@zuzu: Dual-WAN routers tend to simply load balance. MLPPP provides layer 2 bonding, which is sort of a big difference (positively so).

[#18 posted by Anonymous, February 9, 2009 3:29 PM]

@Plorry: Montreal-DSL is a reseller of TekSavvy. Probably better off just going with TekSavvy themselves.

[#19 posted by Anonymous, February 9, 2009 3:38 PM]

@Antinous: TekSavvy is a family-owned business, so they're unlikely to be gobbled up by a larger ISP any time soon.

@K386: TekSavvy is a Bell/Telus wholesaler, so they offer DSL service wherever Bell and Telus do. That means that if you can't get DSL from TekSavvy in Toronto, you can't get DSL from anybody period. You can call them up to get a clarification (they're open 24/7).

@JT Montreal: Acanac are fellow Bell wholesalers, like TekSavvy. They run a hosting business (Canaca), which subsidizes their DSL offering. This is how they're able to take a loss for the first year (they charge, ~$19/mth, which is below cost since Bell charges them ~$20 per line). Their yearly rate after that first year is $34/mth.

Anyhow, you don't strictly speaking need Tomato/MLPPP to use MLPPP (Disclaimer: I'm one of the two people who run fixppp.org and the various MLPPP projects from there). There are several other alternatives:

1) MPD on BSD has some support for MLPPP, although I understand it's a nightmare to get working. Not recommended, but technically possible.

2) On fixppp.org, we also have ZeroShell/MLPPP (the Tomato/MLPPP core logic ported to the ZeroShell linux router disto) and Linux/MLPPP (the ZeroShell code ported to run on any Linux distro). In effect, we automate all the link management so that you can use multiple lines just as easily as using a single line on any Linux distro. We have Git repos for all this, it's all opensourced as much as is possible (excluding, for example, the Tomato UI that the original author never opened, or the Broadcom drivers).

3) Under Windows, you can do single/multi link MLPPP using the built-in client (for single) or RasPPPoE (for multi). This is currently not working due to a temporary change in MLPPP setup on TekSavvy's end; they found some serious bugs in Juniper's software (they use Juniper routers), and so they had to change their MLPPP setup such that Windows doesn't work until Juniper delivers their fix. *nix based MLPPP products still work, though.

As a temporary workaround for Windows users, we've been telling them to run ZeroShell inside of VirtualBox on their Windows machines. It's a non-ideal solution, but it does get them going again until Juniper gets the patch out.

- Guspaz

[#20 posted by astrochimp, February 9, 2009 4:03 PM]

I hear that Velcom also supports MLPPP.

TekSavvy is all around good. My only complaint is that you have to opt-in to the mildly more expensive static IP option in order to access their usenet servers.

[#21 posted by strumpet windsock, February 9, 2009 4:05 PM]

Move to Saskatchewan, Cory.

It seems to be the only place on the planet where the economy is growing, and sasktel is a crown corporation, so they have no reason to throttle bandwidth.

[#22 posted by gamehead200, February 9, 2009 4:27 PM]

+1 for Teksavvy. Had it in Waterloo and Toronto for 8 months and now have it in Montreal.

[#23 posted by ArghMonkey, February 9, 2009 4:41 PM]

Cory you are the man!

This is great!

Im currently with Shaw Cable and im loving what ive read about the ISP.

I called and talked to a nice girl in Chatham and the only funny thing is they dont advertise the advantages that your article points out, kind of a shame.

[#24 posted by zuzu, February 9, 2009 4:43 PM]

Dual-WAN routers tend to simply load balance. MLPPP provides layer 2 bonding, which is sort of a big difference (positively so).

Agreed. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is mostly a big difference for peak throughput of single TCP sessions. However, if you're using a DHT protocol such as, say, BitTorrent, you're already making hundreds if not thousands of separate TCP sessions to transport the same data set.

So, MLPPP does scale better if your concern is with uploading large MPEG-2 files to the Internet Archive, but won't be as noticeable if you're mostly torrenting, running a TOR node, or participating in the YaCY distributed search engine.

[#25 posted by Anonymous, February 9, 2009 5:09 PM]

In Ottawa, we have Teksavvy through National Capital Freenet, an ISP co-operative. 500 Mbps, 200 GB/Month for $29.95 Yaay NCF! They also provide decent free-of-charge dialup to anyone who needs it, and they encourage connection sharing.

[#26 posted by Anonymous, February 9, 2009 5:14 PM]

I was a fairly content Bell user for a decade, but when they started their throttling (and inconsistently lied about it), I switched to Teksavvy. I'm very happy with their service, though I'd recommend switching to the Tomato/MLPPP system to get the most out of it, since Bell is throttling every ISP that rents their CRTC mandated last-mile infrastructure.

[#27 posted by kinetix, February 9, 2009 5:31 PM]

I use acanac. It's cheap and the people running the place actually get it... which is nice, for a change.

[#28 posted by Narfig_Agar, February 9, 2009 5:39 PM]

I'm with Cogeco Cable in Hamilton, (Ontario Canada). They throttle upstream, but it's nothing a little encryption can't get around. They also cap, but do offer an unlimited commercial account for ~$200 a month.

Personally, the caps don't normally bother me...except for that one time I tried to obtain a full Dr. Who catalog. Not perfect, but not a Bell or Rogers.

[#29 posted by Keppoch, February 9, 2009 5:44 PM]

@#23 posted by ArghMonkey

I'm on Shaw too and haven't had a single problem with the service.

[#30 posted by Simon Cameron, February 9, 2009 5:44 PM]

So, now that you've found a good provider you are going to be fleeing the U.K's surveillance and coming back to Canada, right?

Better hurry before you are put on a no-fly list.

[#31 posted by Anonymous, February 9, 2009 5:51 PM]

@zuzu: True, to a certain extent.

If all you're doing is torrenting, there won't be that much of a difference in performance, unless you're in smaller swarms where being able to pass the limits of one DSL line to a single user could be useful.

However, there are many other scenarios where bonding is preferable. For one thing, any type of single-connection download. HTTP downloads, for example. Having two DSL lines, I can download at the aggregate speed from a website. Load balancing would let me download multiple files at the same time and still get the aggregate speed, but that's often not what I want. Download accelerators would help with this.

Sending any kind of file to anybody using a non-P2P protocol is going to benefit from bonding. I'm a fansubber, and we use the excellent Dropbox service to collaborate. Being able to sync at double the speed is certainly an advantage, not to mention when I need to SCP files to my server remotely.

There's also a slight latency decrease from MLPPP (since Linux will split packets on the upstream instead of round-robin like BSD uses). I save about 9ms sending a full-sized packet. And of course, you CAN send full sized packets; sending a 1500 byte packet in one go is something you can't ordinarily do without bonding on PPPoE systems.

And of course, there's also the fact that MLPPP gets around Bell's throttling. That's how this all started out; a friend and myself followed up on some initial reports that adding the "mp" option to your pppd config file defeated throttling, and went from there. We tried to get it working on my Tomato-based router, and eventually realized that it would be really neat if we were to take that and add support for bonding two lines, which is the point behind MLPPP in the first place.

These days, multi-line bonding is the primary focus of our development, even if most of our users are doing single-link MLPPP (yes, I recognize the oxymoron involved) for throttling circumvention. Our work on Tomato/MLPPP even led to contracts with other individuals/ISPs to add features or port code around (leading to ZeroShell/MLPPP and Linux/MLPPP).

TekSavvy estimates that about 2000 of their customers use MLPPP in some form (most of them probably use Tomato/MLPPP), with "a couple hundred" bonding two or more lines.

- Guspaz

[#32 posted by donatolla, February 9, 2009 6:17 PM]

Another here with TekSavvy - positively the best ISP available in Ontario.

My favourite reason? When you call them, you get to speak to a human right away.

I'd personally stay away from Acanac - service has a history of being below expectations.

Folks looking to make a change should always looks at reviews online: Broadbandreports is the best forum I know of for this.

[#33 posted by Flashman, February 9, 2009 6:18 PM]

I just moved to Ottawa from London UK and have just started service with Teksavvy - a cursory search indicated that they offered the best service/best reputation. So far, so good.

A question though: Will Tomato/MLPP work on this Thomson 585 router I just bought, or does it have to be of the Linksys WRT54 variety?

[#34 posted by Robbo, February 9, 2009 6:59 PM]

I switched from Rogers to Teksavvy after a lengthy period of time blogging about how incredibly fucked Rogers was. The final straw was when they kept hijacking my browser to serve notices to me about their services and my bandwidth usage. I used my blog as a bully pulpit for the cause, looked around and found Teksavvy, made the leap and have never regretted it. They are the best. Rogers and Bell are totally suck balls bogus.

So there.

[#35 posted by Anonymous, February 9, 2009 7:19 PM]

I use Nexicom in Peterborough, ON - get about 20Mb/s down X 1Mb/s up via DSL... They do not use Bell here, they own their own DSLAM's and it rocks!

As a Usenet junkie I have never seen an ISP offer such wicked speeds and no caps or throttling BS I used to have with Bell Sympatico.

Their tech support absolutely is terrible with long wait times on the phone. I have emailed them on several occasions only to get a "reboot, try again" respones or worse yet no response at all. Hopefully your service works as good as mine and you not need to contact them for tech support.

[#36 posted by Big Dave Diode, February 9, 2009 7:52 PM]

As much as I hate to defend Telus, and while they may be doing deep packet inspection in any case, they certainly don't throttle BitTorrent traffic the way Rogers does. The Glasnost tool (http://broadband.mpi-sws.org/transparency/bttest-mlab.php) indicates they don't anyway.

[#37 posted by Anonymous, February 9, 2009 8:09 PM]

@FLASHMAN: Tomato/MLPPP requires a WRT54GL, yes. Well, that or any other compatible router; compatibility is the same as Tomato itself.

@ANONYMOUS: Yes, Nexicom is quite good. Unfortunately, they only offer higher speed service in limited areas, primarily Peterborough.

@BIG DAVE DIODE: Then don't defend them; Telus fought against consumers by insisting that Bell is within their rights to throttle the customers of other companies during CRTC proceedings. They may not be doing the same thing as Bell, but are busy defending their ability to do so if they choose.

- Guspaz

[#38 posted by Anonymous, February 10, 2009 3:50 AM]

But the million-dollar question -- do they provide service to Newfoundland? Just dial-up, apparently. I'll just have to continue my suffering under the iron fist of Bell-Aliant...

[#39 posted by Anonymous, February 10, 2009 5:03 AM]

@#9 --- Also, we wont put your daughter's dna in a database here in Canada. We might make her register her shotgun, but no dna database...

[#40 posted by Anonymous, February 10, 2009 7:07 AM]

@Guspaz

How does Teksavvy resell bell DSL and not get throttled like Velcom et al?

[#41 posted by michaelocc, February 10, 2009 9:25 AM]

Kinda OT, but: there may indeed be many reasons for not moving back to Canada, but as a displaced Irishman who grew up in the UK and has called Toronto home these past 13 years, I can stack up many more reasons for not moving back to England.

In fact, I need look no further for reasons than the pages of this august blog itself. Here, for example: http://www.boingboing.net/2009/01/23/worstever-threat-to.html

Or here: http://www.boingboing.net/2008/01/29/leaked-uk-govt-doc-r.html

Or even this piece from earlier today:
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/02/10/brits-reply-to-lord.html

"Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant." They're creating a privacy desert and calling it peace.

[#42 posted by Anonymous, February 10, 2009 9:57 AM]

Teksavvy indeed rocks. I've had them for almost 3 years and they're fantastic! I had slow speeds one time after i moved so I called them... Was speaking with a very knowledgable tech in 1 minute, problem solved in less that 5. They even called me back later to ask if everything was to my satisfaction! Bell or Rogers can't offer 1% of the quality of service they do! Fuck Bell, especially their loving throttling.

[#43 posted by jayBOT, February 10, 2009 1:03 PM]

Get my unlimited dry-line DSL through the aforementioned Acanaca. Their intro rate is awesome and have been very happy with my speed. Bell still seems to do some traffic shaping despite their protests.Acanaca forum support seems to help find some wasy around this...

I also enjoyed telling the Rogers people that knocked on my door the other day exactly what I pay for unlimited high-speed!

[#44 posted by Anonymous, February 12, 2009 10:30 PM]

TELUS does not now, nor have they ever done deep packet inspection. Not sure where you got your info from, but I guarantee you, if your getting poor throughput on torrents, its not TELUS causing the problem.

[#45 posted by Anonymous, June 14, 2009 10:58 PM]

Sadly out here in Winnipeg, TekSavvy is unavailable. Fortunately, so are Bell and Rogers. Our only options are Shaw cable and Manitoba Telecom (DSL). However, Shaw traffic-shapes and has a pretty strict upload rate cap - it's been over two years since I got more than 100k/down on any torrents, or more than 60k/up on anything at all. MTS is similarly bog-slow, but when I had it it could almost never keep the connection going for more than five minutes at a time. The customer service person explained that this was because my router (a bog-standard Linksys WRT54G) was "unsupported", and only with an MTS-supplied router (at the time a cheap Netgear they sold for double the sticker price) would the connection be functional. In fairness, though, MTS is is the third-largest telco behind Bell and Telus, so crap like that shouldn't be entirely unexpected.