[theAryanTwang]

Ok, the Internet has been giving me some huge issues lately and I'm going grey because of it, so I want to hear everyone's opinions/testimonials.

I've been on DSL nearly since it came out, and have it through the same company I had dialup through -- <!-- w --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.mnsi.net">www.mnsi.net</a><!-- w --> (Windsor) -- Up until August 2005 I didn't have any problems. But just about all through August I was up and down. Keep in mind August was also the hottest month of the year and I wouldn't be surprised if that had some impact on me. So then after repeated phone calls they supposedly "switched me to a closer station" in September and it seemed like things got better and were Ok, I wasn't getting disconnected, but speed didn't improve either.

Now last Friday morning it went down again, and didn't come back up until Monday night -- that's 3 days down, with no notice, no nothing. I was so fed up that it wasn't up by Saturday I went to the cable company and signed up for that.

So cable comes today and I get everything going, but low and behold, cogeco has some filter (that they don't admit to having) that blocks torrents!!! Well I shouldn't say it blocks them, but only lets them transfer at 1kb/s. Is this normal? Does anyone else have cable and get blocked?

Now I have no clue what to do. Cable blocks torrents and has a bandwidth cap. DSL has no cap but only gives me a max of 1mbps bandwidth while cable does 5mbps steady. I know for a fact that DSL in my area is plain out shitty and unreliable at best. I don't know if I'm too far from the station or if the phone cabling in this area gets eaten by rats, but it sure sucks the big one.

I guess I'm going to stick with DSL because I'll go into withdrawals if I can't access torrents, but it kills me to do it because DSL can go down anytime without notice and there is nothing my ISP can do about it (AFAIK).

/end rant

anyone who has horror stories of their own please share!

[srb]

Very frustrating indeed. I was a customer of Rogers Cable for 4 years. Last spring, they sent me emails saying they were "upgrading" their networks, and part of that included "upgrading" everyone's cable modem. I took my old one in, got the new one, and when I got it all set up again, my torrents flatlined. This was back in the spring, when there were rumours of "bandwidth shaping" going on by Rogers, which is now confirmed.

I switched to 3web.ca, a Canadian reseller of both DSL, and cable internet. I chose DSL, so I could try it out before cancelling my Rogers account. It works great, has gone down once or twice in 8-9 months, but I'm getting the same download speeds I had with Roger's regular Cable internet, but more that double upload speeds, and it costs 1/3 less than Rogers (or Sympatico). They offer cable internet, but I was concerned about Torrents working since they basically run off of Roger's network.

Also, no bandwidth cap (as of yet.....)

check them out: http://www.3web.ca

[Shane Kroeker]

You guys shouldn't be the ones complaing, I have Dial-Up and it took me about 20 hrs to download a bootleg of the tracker at 2kb/s. Now how fortunate are you? :roll:

[VioletlightHeron]

I never downloaded torrents or things from the tracker on dial up just because it's not worth the hassle of having to let your computer sit for hours on end and block normal phone traffic since I only had one phone line. It's less hassle and not expensive to simply ask somebody on the forum or hosting a torrent to do a B & P.