Carry Telecom -- too good to be true?

[William Park]

Today at high noon, I switched to Carrytel Cable75 (75M/10M, unlimited, $35/month).  That's $25 cheaper than Teksavvy's equivalent.  So far, it performs as promised.

[fox]

Wow, that's impressive.

[dougal]

william ,  i'm also looking at their offerings...though that one isn't listed as available in ptboro.(40,60,100) $99 to buy their modem or are you renting the modem? how much lead time before tech came to make the connection?

[William Park]

I bought the modem (Technicolor TC4350).  I gave notice 1 month ahead of time, so no problem with switch over.  Well, internet wise.

I still have VoIP phone with Teksavvy, and the ATA is pretty much locked to Teksavvy.  I don't mind, because I don't know what all those parameters are, anyways.  But, my phone didn't work with the new modem.  It was DNS problem.  The ATA was manually using Teksavvy DNS servers which don't respond to non-Teksavvy IPs.  So, ATA couldn't resolve Teksavvy VoIP server.  Remove the manual DNS entries, and use default DNS that modem gives out, and my phone worked.  It took me 6 hours to figure that out!

[Jason]

Thanks for telling us about your experience. Please let us know again in a month or two how it is going, William.

[dougal]

william
i'm wondering if your ISP address is showing up as USA based instead of Canada...this was written about it a couple of threads....it was supposed to switch after a couple of weeks..i don't understand the reasoning for this but seemed to be the experience of the writers generally and some were stating that it wasn't consistent....perhaps carrytel is utilizing a 'stable' of routing hosts (if that makes sense)...my interest is that some websites i daily use for webstreaming (tsn,sportsnet,tvo) will not support ISP addressess outside Canada(geoblock)....thus i would have to use a vpn service...opera browser was good for this but has made recent changes which reduced the ability to choose single countries (north america).... anyone have suggestions on this situation?

[ssfc72]

Dougal

Thanks for the heads up about the Opera browser reducing it's VPN functionality by now, not allowing a specific country to be chosen.

Bill

[dougal]

WILLIAM.......wondering how the Carrytel experience has been?

[dougal]

i decided to go with start.ca instead of carrytell after reading some comments online and williams experience of consistently dropped service while on voip calls + jason's comments of how reliable start.ca has been for him.....I know that bill is switching over to start.ca so i thought i'd post this here as a continuation of the general conversation...i transferred over from cogeco to start.ca last night....things went 'as advertised' such that i was still on cogeco this morning at 1am but gone when i started this morning...plugged directly into the technocolor modem and there was start.ca signal....plugged router into the mix and it didn't seem to like things though and after friggin' with it (power starts and factory resets) for a while i discovered a faulty ethernet cable from modem to router ..switched cables and voila, back to internet connection....speed test showed as advertised , so far-so good.... saving $20/month($40+5/65) renting modem for now@5$/mth  and larger bandwidth cap(200/95)....didn't get voip as i already have an acct with magicjack@ 45$/yr.for unlimited usa+canada...

ps, they said you should see the referral reward on your next bill jason, let me know if that doesn't happen.

[Jason]

Thanks, for giving me the referral award, Dougal! Really appreciate that.

Btw, we use Magicjack for our home phone, too. Calls are always crystal clear according to my wife.

[Jason]

I received my $25 referral credit on the bill today. Thanks, dougal!

[dougal]

good to hear that , and things are working here as advertised so far, so thanks for the referral....

[William Park]

Update on CarryTel...  I'm in Rogers area, whereas you guys are in Cogeco area.  My connection seems to have stabilized.  Frequent outage could've been due to "CMTSs operating systems maintenance" that Rogers were doing.

[dougal]

thanks for the update william as your reported voip interuptions was a main deterent and thus my choosing to go with start.ca...I didn't read of anyone using them locally to see if that was a general experience.