Canadian ISP that appears not to suck

By Cory Doctorow at 1:06 pm Monday, Feb 9

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!)