Matt Van Stone

This weekend we made the switch from Telus to Shaw for internet and phone. There were two things keeping me with Telus. One was they never complained about how much I downloaded. Well actually, they did once, but they totally had a right too (360GB in one month). To be honest I was just trying to see how much I could get away with. The other reason was to switch to Shaw phone would cost me $55/month instead of $30. But now things have changed. I’m not downloading nearly as much as I used to and Shaw has introduced their Shaw Phone Lite for $29.99 (+$0.04/minute long distance). So now for the same price I was paying for high-speed and phone at Telus, I’m getting high-speed (that’s twice as fast [5Mbps vs 2.5 @ Telus]) and Phone with call-display (call display is extra at Telus).

So basically it was a no brainer at this point.

A few things I want to mention… The guy who installed the internet had to look at my computer after the internet was installed and note all the specs. So I booted it up into Windows for him because he didn’t know crap about Linux. When it booted up he wanted to know why I didn’t have an anti-virus installed in Windows. Well, it’s probably because I don’t use Windows. Not only that, but be didn’t even want to look at the Mac. Anyway. I should have just left him in Linux and told him I didn’t even have Windows. Then he wanted to look at the setup on my fileserver. I just told him it was Linux too and it was internal only, both of which are lies. I can understand wanting to take a look a the computer just to confirm that you aren’t going to call Shaw in 20 minutes to complain about your speed when you are running Windows 95 and IE 5. But I thought it was pretty obvious that I had everything under control.

I think I might need a new router though. When I had the Shaw hooked directly to my workstation it was blazingly fast. Pages loaded instantly. I reset the router to factory settings and reconfigured it. That seemed to make it a bit faster, but I still found a delay when it is doing the DNS lookup.