ISP notes: Telus
What to do about crap internet service when your choices are crap or different crap.
I signed up for a Telus Business account, primarily to have fixed IPs to the house. I had an emergency issue resulting in downtime. I filed a ticket for service. 12 days later they left me a single voicemail.
Professional
Telus ain't.
The idea that a small business has to put up with this kind of crap service is what caused me to leave them last time. I still do not have my fixed IP addresses, 4 months later.
I chose to give them a try again because we moved into a building which was not serviced by my preferred provider - TekSavvy. TekSavvy has pretty good service. Not stellar, not knock my socks off, it is pretty good. The quality of the service they provide is average, for better than average prices, and it is often clear the companies whose network they are carrying on are actively interfering with the QoS, quite illegally by the way.
In BC, that would be Telus who is deliberately degrading the service provided by TekSavvy.
Best thing about TekSavvy, though, is they care about their customers. If I file a ticket it is almost always first-pass checked that day, or the next. I am not talking about serious critical issues - I have never had those with TekSavvy - but run-of-the-mill something is not working and can you help me trouble-shoot-it-please? type issues. One day, tops.
Options
As far as I am aware there are exactly two ISPs who service this fiber-to-the-unit building. Telus, and the other company I left for issues, Shaw. The primary issue with that second option is their SOHO business program is darned expensive, and barely microstep up in terms of service. Telus also owns the hardware in this building; having Telus mess with the QoS for Shaw for the same price or higher just seems like paying more for even less.
Conclusion
I moved (most of) my mission critical services to an online cloud. WHICH I HATE DOING. Yes, I still have one storage-intensive server operating solely on the current service. I could not afford equivalent storage in the cloud (I got big discs and I cannot lie…) But now I have working services behind working proxy servers with working certificates both inside and outside the lan.
What I should do, now, is kill my business account and go with minimal residential service to conserve budget. Except, well, I got big discs. I occasionally need big pipes. Okay, I could live with normal speed internet. But I would whinge. And my partner (who streams video) hates whingers.
decisions decisions