Internet Service: Shaw High Speed

[hugh]

The purpose of this thread is for Digital Home members to review and relay their experience with Shaw High Speed internet service.

This is NOT a discussion thread so please limit yourself to one post which includes your review.

We welcome the input and opinions of all members whether they are good or bad, however, please note that this thread is NOT for rants. Whether you had a good or bad experience with this vendor we want to hear about it but in an OBJECTIVE manner.

If you post a rant or childish comments like, these guys "suck" or they're all a "bunch of idiots", then your comments will be considered trolling and your post will be deleted.

When you post, please try to include the following information:

• What product or service you purchased.
• Approximate timeframe you ordered the product
• What location you dealt with if it’s a company with many stores or service locations
• Your overall level of satisfaction
• If you had a positive experience, please explain what made it such a positive experience.
• If you had a negative experience, please read our guidelines below.

Guidelines for Posting Negative Reviews

The truth is no retailer or service provider is perfect and occasionally even the best companies can disappoint. Our experience is that good companies have problems but they typically make every reasonable effort to resolve problems.

If you had a problem and are posting a negative review, then please note what efforts you made to resolve the problem and the feedback you received. If you think the efforts to resolve the problem were NOT reasonable then please explain why. Saying you phoned up and talked to some idiot, suggests the problem may lie with the consumer and NOT the company!

No posting URLS or Directs to Competitors will be deleted

Posts containing URL's to competitors or posts saying gee you should have shopped at this retailer will be considered spam and deleted.

We want opinions, NOT sales pitches or spam!

This is NOT a discussion thread so please limit yourself to one post which includes your review.

We welcome the input and opinions of all members whether they are good or bad, however, please note that this thread is NOT for rants. Whether you had a good or bad experience with this vendor we want to hear about it but in an OBJECTIVE manner.

If you post a rant or childish comments like, these guys "suck" or they're all a "bunch of idiots", then your comments will be considered trolling and your post will be deleted.

When you post, please try to include the following information:

• What product or service you purchased.
• Approximate timeframe you ordered the product
• What location you dealt with if it’s a company with many stores or service locations
• Your overall level of satisfaction
• If you had a positive experience, please explain what made it such a positive experience.
• If you had a negative experience, please read our guidelines below.

Guidelines for Posting Negative Reviews

The truth is no retailer or service provider is perfect and occasionally even the best companies can disappoint. Our experience is that good companies have problems but they typically make every reasonable effort to resolve problems.

If you had a problem and are posting a negative review, then please note what efforts you made to resolve the problem and the feedback you received. If you think the efforts to resolve the problem were NOT reasonable then please explain why. Saying you phoned up and talked to some idiot, suggests the problem may lie with the consumer and NOT the company!

No posting URLS or Directs to Competitors will be deleted

Posts containing URL's to competitors or posts saying gee you should have shopped at this retailer will be considered spam and deleted.

We want opinions, NOT sales pitches or spam!

[kcowan]

Would have been happier is they had not introduced wave-shaping technology on a stealth basis. Solid service although they require router reboot after they have a problem. Email service is not as reliable.

[Sean in Cochran]

I've been a Shaw customer since they were @Home (10 years!). Only complaints I have would be that their Usenet news servers are poor, but with the proliferation of blogs, that is far less of an issue now than it was a few years ago.
I've only notice a couple of hours service outage over the last year.
Also have the Digital box and Phone service (that "unlimited" long distance is quite handy since none of our family is anywhere near here). Now, if only they would get into the cell phone provisioning...

[Moose57]

Shaw internet has been generally very reliable in my older area since @Home days.
Speeds are very close to advertised, within 90-95%.
I've had 5, 7.5 and 15 MBps service over the years.
I recently tried Telus 15 MBps for 30 days and it was every bit as good on all side by side comparison using 2 identical machines and routers.
The only edge their competitor appeared to have was no slowdown on Bit Torrent traffic.

I recently ran some BT testing and it showed no apparent Shaw throttling.
Rather surprising actually.
Since discovering that LESS is MORE and adjusting settings, well seeded torrents have not slowed.

The root cause appears to be router overload with excessive connections.

My only bone with Shaw was based on price, and then only because if you are unbundled, better offers can be had.
Seems Shaw's holier than though, only game on the block atitude blinded them to real competitive offers out there.
Why undbundle you ask from a former triple play customer of 10+ years, simple, the HD TV & PVR went first due to line up, PQ and audio dropouts.. Digital phone, while rock solid, unfortunately had to go next as POTS was tied to a free year of TSTV, so no choice on that one.

While bundling is generally good for both the provider as it gains loyalty and the subscriber due to cost savings, it takes all departments doing their best or risk loosing all of them, which eventually happened.

Had I known at the time what I do now, I likely would have stayed with Telus for internet, but ran into mail forwarding issues I later solved using an SMTP relay service.
So I ended up essentially back using Shaw's cable Modem and coax, but billed and supported at a substantial discount with an ISP that was formerly the perceived worst.

I can honestly say that early reports of poor support have not materialized, and in fact have been comparable with Shaw support in my dealings.

My final point is that in my region, the major players are technically a wash and the 2nd tier guys won out solely based on cost.

I am a consumer like any others after all.

And like above, the short retention of the NNTP service along with NNTP traffic throttling was a major negative.
Easily handled by many inexpensive dedicated news providers with much longer retentions and full spped service.
However, with the po[popularity of torrents, this is now less an issues.

Our family really likes the start.shaw.ca customer web portal, but have noticed it's reliability has been extremely disappointing for quite some months now.
email service was always top notch and the webmail a nice addition when traveling.

[Interceptor]

I mostly like my Shaw Internet except for the price. Part of the problem is that in my area, I have little choice. The only other provider is Telus and when I talked to a field guy at my house fixing my telephone, he suggested not to bother with Telus internet at my location. As for telephone, the only game in town is Telus and they don't offer any price breaks either. Lack of competition is not good.

I get well above the normal speed for regular high speed but I've also had frequent loss of signal so all in all I give it somewhat satisfied.