So for the first time at home I have what until relatively recently would have been viewed as LAN speed for my Internet service, and with an unlimited, and reasonably managed bandwidth policy.  I’m not an abusively high user, I’ve almost always stuck inside my current cap on my DSL service, but I do appreciate that a good service provider should manage their networks during extreme congestion.

My experience with Teksavvy has been positive enough over the years, I’ve been a customer since 2006, and I’ve only ever had one provider that was better and this was back in the .com bubble days when Ottawa was crawling with technically savvy and responsive providers!  So I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt that they will not do anything naughty with their traffic shaping policies.  

As a company they have been fairly aggressive in terms of consumer advocacy and sane Internet policies in Canada and have been quite quite active with organizations like Open Media and CRTC hearings.  So here’s hoping they don’t go full retard!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wVagQ_LVd4

(Great movie by the way!)

I don’t need to run any servers from home any longer now that everything I still do as part of my (much reduced) Internet footprint is hosted at Amazon on EC2 and Route 53.  So that made it possible to move off of a DSL service as I no longer had the requirement to route a publically reachable subnet to my home.  But I’ve held off for a while hoping that Bell would open up my neighbourhood to a 50Mbps or higher service (they’re offering 940Mbps in some parts of the GTA right now).  My guess is that they can right now but are holding off until they are forced to by this summer’s CRTC ruling.

This is a whole other topic that I should write a bit about one of these days.  The incumbents continue to play silly games to try to control the market in Canada and they need to be brought to heel, Internet service is an essential public good in 2015 and needs to be regulated as such.

Bandwidth isn’t an urgent problem for me, but as somebody who spends so much time working on the Internet it can be a bit annoying to have to wait for large downloads of software or data transfers of photos and it’s pathetic the limited infrastructure that the incumbent providers offer in Toronto, let alone the rest of the country.  I’m only a couple of kilometers from the largest Internet exchange in Canada and the available service should be better.

My only concern is to see how much congestion there is during peak hours on my local segment.  I doubt that the bandwidth will ever be so low as to complain about since I’m coming from a service that has 1/4 the capacity, but I am curious if it may cause noticeable problems with latency.  I’m keeping the DSL service for a month before I deactivate it so I can compare the services side-by-side, but my service should be fully cut over later today.