[May 2014 – I can no longer recommend NCF as an ISP, please see the comments on the post for a link to an updated article]<\/p>\n
The National Captial Freenet<\/a> (NCF) is the 3rd ISP I’ve had high speed service from.\u00a0 Originally not having cable, I chose the Digital Subscriber Line<\/a> (DSL) solution and went with Bell who provided my phone service.\u00a0 I might still be with them had it not been for Magma<\/a> changing the rules on their dial up email account causing my @magma.ca address to expire, so switching to Magma (which was bought by Primus) for highspeed allowed me to keep my email address active.\u00a0 I don’t have much good to say about Primus.<\/p>\n With Bell, I was stuck on the 1Meg Nortel modem for a long time.\u00a0 My neighbourhood had been upgraded to use the newer higher speeds, but due to my ignorance (and Bell’s lack of information) I kept paying the same premium cost and getting low speed.\u00a0 Until I found out things had been better for many of my friends on DSL and called Bell to upgrade.\u00a0 It was a free upgrade, but annoying that it took me calling to get it to happen – I also had some interruption in service in the switch-over.<\/p>\n Calling Bell customer service was always frustrating, you had to run through the standard script – only to get yourself passed along to the next level where you might get someone more informed.\u00a0 I had an intermittent problem on the line and it was impossible to get help from them.<\/p>\n When I moved to Magma, the switch was smooth on their end.\u00a0 Bell continued to charge me for my DSL line for a couple of extra months, even though I wasn’t using their services.\u00a0 A huge thumbs down on Bell’s billing department.<\/p>\n Magma was a great company, and using their technical support I was able to get my intermittent line issues sorted out and fixed.\u00a0 Sadly, now owned by Primus there is in my experience terrible customer support.\u00a0 As a Magma customer I was grandfathered over to Primus, but apparently didn’t have full rights as a Primus customers (my customer ID wasn’t even a real Primus one).\u00a0 After a 20+ minute wait on hold just to talk to someone, I ended up in a frustrating conversation which took at least another 20 minutes to determine they couldn’t give me the service I wanted (DSL + static IP) at a competitive price.<\/p>\n Ages ago, my Dad had pointed me at NCF offering high speed at a very reasonable rate.\u00a0 I probably should have made the switch a long time ago, but I convinced myself into thinking that maintaining my email identity @magma was worth the extra cost.\u00a0 Ken<\/a> had also had some success with Magma as an ISP, but I suspect my recent success moving away from them will help convince him to make the leap too.<\/p>\n Signing up with NCF is done online, similar to many ISPs today.\u00a0 They do support switching from another ISP and their website recommends a week or two of overlap to avoid losing service.\u00a0 I cut things a bit fine, but the switch-over looks like it has gone ok (knock on wood).\u00a0 There was a small mess up with the start of service date, to which I got a fairly detailed email reply promptly – included in that note was the line “any further questions, just give us a call” followed by the office number.\u00a0 On a whim, I dialed it up to check on one more detail – and was astounded to hit “0” and almost immediately talk to someone.\u00a0 Better still, they knew what they were doing – and could answer my question right then and there.<\/p>\n As I already own a DSL modem and line filters etc.\u00a0 The only thing I needed from them was service.\u00a0 I was able to switch over before my Primus account had expired, and today marks the official start of my NCF service.\u00a0 When I initially switched (June 25th) I did some speedtests<\/a> to see how things were.\u00a0 On Primus\/Magma my speeds were consistently 2500kb\/s down and 650kb\/s up.\u00a0 On the 26th, switching to my new DSL login on NCF – I wasn’t surprised to see the same numbers.\u00a0 Today I checked my speed again.\u00a0 WOW!\u00a0 4400kb\/s down and 650kb\/s up.\u00a0 Maybe its a fluke, but I’m hoping it isn’t.<\/p>\n Summary<\/strong> – NCF offers DSL service for $29.95 a month<\/a>, no contract.\u00a0 There is no speed cap, so up to 5 Mb\/s down, 800 Kb\/s up (max).\u00a0 They offer static IPs for additional cost.\u00a0 It is run by people who know what they are doing.\u00a0 This not-for-profit organization<\/a> deserves your business.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [May 2014 – I can no longer recommend NCF as an ISP, please see the comments on the post for a link to an updated article] The National Captial Freenet (NCF) is the 3rd ISP I’ve had high speed service from.\u00a0 Originally not having cable, I chose the Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) solution and went … Continue reading “NCF DSL Review”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-94","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","category-soap-box"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1451,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94\/revisions\/1451"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}