My employer's connection is via radio. The speed that we are promised is pretty much what we get; consistently over 4000kb/s down and over 700kb/s up. Perhaps this is the future of where ISPs need to go. At least until the large telcos smarten up and work together to increase the optical fibre network. It's a shame that in our country the large ISPs can't get it together like some of the smaller business ISP suppliers. Posted by: Trevor | Nov 26, 07 11:08 AM

re: Bell Sympatico; maximum DSL distance from C.O. Bell definitely has the worst performance across the board from any of the providers I have purchased bandwidth. All of my friends and acquaintances who have subscribed to Bell in the past also have had very poor performance with Bell Sympatico's service. The biggest problem with Sympatico is their poor tech support and lack of interest to provide their customers with the high speed they are advertising. At the time, I was requesting to be moved to a closer C.O. (i.e. Central Office) but Bell gave me the run-around and didn't escalate the request to Bell Nexxia tech support (which is the phone company's "real" ISP/engineering crew). Bell Sympatico was giving me a paltry 45K/sec when I should have been getting up to 300K/sec. So I switched to another provider which immediately recognized my request to be switched to a closer C.O. [My phone line was over 5 km from the C.O. - which in DSL terms means that it's too far to give adequate performance. Ideally, one should be within 0-2.5km from the C.O.] Within 3 days, a Bell Nexxia engineer gave me a call; tested the line; and then sent out a tech to switch my line to a closer C.O. The tech called me up the next day to warn me that a switch was being made. The switch took less than 10 minutes. He then came over to my house and tested the line. The performance went from 45K/sec to near the advertised maximum bandwidth of 300k/sec (at the time). I have been with this provider ever since due to the fact that their tech support is good and performance nearly meets their advertised maximum speed. Posted by: Max | Nov 27, 07 12:35 PM

What speeds are these people paying their ISPs for? I'm pretty familiar with Shaw. The lowest speeds are normal for the lite speed internet I think this should be part of the chart... Posted by: Kevin | Nov 28, 07 11:47 PM

One thing left out of the show was the speed that websites allow for download. They have to pay for a big pipe to allow the fast speeds, many limit their download speed to keep the operating cost down. This speed thing isn't as simple as the show proposed. Posted by: Carl | Dec 30, 07 05:15 PM