f13.net

Anyone know of any decent ISPs in Montreal? Currently I live out of a hotel-room (having moved over here from Oslo in the middle of August), but I'll hopefully be moving into an actual apartment within the next week and a half, and from what I've seen it's not very common to include Internet-connections in the rents, so I need to find a decent one to sign up for on my own - preferably one without bandwith limits (unlikely from what I've seen so far - what is this, Australia 2?) and without throttling p2p traffic.

I have done some browsing and found various providers - but I have absolutely no clue which ones are any good or not. :/

Umm.  I know several decent CA firms in Montreal.  Does that help?

I'm not 100% sure who is in your area but Rogers/Cogeco are decent for Cable (Cogeco typically has the better service.) If you don't want to shell out for Cable, the best DSL ISP is TekSavvy. I used them for a good 6 months before moving and it had to be the best experience I've had with an ISP. Roughly $30 a month for 5Mbps with a 200gb cap and I think to get unlimited bandwidth was $5 or $10 more. The customer service is amazing and overall the service is perfect.

Otherwise, you should check DSL Reports.

Thanks! Is there any reason why I would want Cable over DSL, or the other way around? I've only had ADSL/Fiber before.

Cable has considerably higher theoretical download/upload speeds and will almost always have a higher upstream than DSL. But Cable speeds are greatly dependent on node capacity.

DSL speed is only affected by line quality/length of cable run to the central office and each link is a separate connection.

If you have had ADSL in the past, and were content with the speed you got from it, I would say trying that out might be your best bet as DSL is almost always considerably cheaper than a cable modem as cable companies tend to really stick it to customers unless they have television service as well. If you are getting cable TV, it probably will be cheaper overall to get a cable modem.

Rogers Cable has pretty much disabled bittorrent for everyone if that matters to you.  Bell Canada (who provides the DSL network) has restricted bittorrent speeds during prime time hours but it's fine the rest of the time.

What's this now?

We are on Rogers, and Both myself and my roommate torrent stuff on a semi frequent basis and never seem to have any unusual difficulty doing so.

Really? Hmm, maybe it's just a Toronto thing then. Or maybe my brother is an idiot. He was unable to get any performance out of Rogers at all and was told that it was because they'd disabled Bittorrent. He eventually switched to Teksavvy and DSL over it. I've always been a DSL guy myself.

The Rogers thing is dependent on your area. I'm in Mississauga and I've had Torrent speeds of 800 - 1.5 without a problem, though it typically doesn't bother me since I use Newsgroups for everything.

I'm used to Cable, so I always get it. The extra 500kbps - 1mbps makes the difference. Not to mention I haven't had a node problem in over 10 years, but that too is area dependent. I think for the most part they've reinforced their infrastructure enough to make it consistent for most of their client base.

You can also look into Bell's new FIOS service. I've only heard good things about it in terms of sustained speed and reliability.

Bell FIOS has metering with very low caps, 100Gb on the highest plan :uhrr:

I have been on Aliant (now Bell) for years and generally have no issues reaching the stated bandwidth cap (800Kb/s) in prime-time. Lucky my DSL plan is a 7.5mbit service that was a grandfathered in 5mbit no cap.

That cap is pretty standard now.