ISP Recommendation? (was "Rogers Breaks DNS")

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Sat, Jul 19, 2008 at 08:33:12AM -0600, Marc Lanctot wrote:
> I'll be moving to Etobicoke soon (from Alberta).. if I want cable, do I 
> have a choice (ie. Cogeco?). I've also heard Rogers does 
> traffic-shaping. Sounds like I might want to avoid Rogers if I can.

For cable rogers is all there is in toronto.  The do shape in some cases
it seems although it is hard to tell sometimes.

> A few more questions about Rogers: do they block incoming traffic on 
> ports other than 80 and 8080? If I leave my machine on all the time and 
> want to SSH in remotely (and run a web server on a non-standard port), 
> will they crack down on this? I know Shaw here nor Videotron in Quebec 
> ever gave me problems, but if Rogers will then I might consider my other 
> options.

ssh works fine.  I don't run a web server since I am pretty sure rogers
hates that.  I know incoming smtp is blocked so a mail server would be a
problem (and certainly not permitted by rogers).  I have heard of a few
people getting in trouble with rogers over servers, although whether
they scan for them anymore (they used to as did shaw before rogers
swapped with them) I don't know.  Certainly if they see a lot of traffic
they may check and then complain.

> I'd really rather avoid DSL.. who provides it there, Bell? I'd like 
> opinions on that-- has anybody done the switch from one to the other? If 
> so, why, and was it worth it?

Lots of companies offer DSL service, but almost all of it goes through
Bell for some of it and they recently decided that they should be
allowed to shape the backend traffic to the other ISPs.

Now Montreal has multiple ISPs that offer ADSL2 at prices similar to
what toronto has for ADSL.  That's not fair. :)

-- 
Len Sorensen
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