March 22, 2009 - Review: Shaw Extreme High Speed Internet Connection
I recently upgraded my Shaw High Speed Internet connection to their Extreme plan. I have used it at some of my client locations and have been impressed with the speed of the connection.

Your typical high speed connection with Shaw gives you 6mbs download speed and 0.5 mbs upload. With Extreme, it pushes this to up to 15 mbs download and 1 mbs upload. It is actually fast enough to serve simple web sites from a local server on this connection (still not recommended for high traffic sites).

Using the Shaw Speed Test at http://speedtest.shaw.ca/speedtest/runtest, it shows that my download speeds were around 16 -20 Mbps and my upload was at 300-400 kbps (even while I was downloading another large file).

The speed is nice for HTTP (or surfing web sites via your browser) but the prime reason I wanted it was to send large backup files from my various servers to my office server and I am finding that my connection speed for downloading via FTP has hardly increased (I achieve download speeds of 120 kbs to 260 kbs). The reason for this is that Shaw does deep packet inspection, meaning that they throttle traffic by inspecting what type of traffic it is.

If you think that getting the Shaw Extreme or Nitro plan will let you download your favourite movies and tv shows via file sharing, torrents or news groups - think again as they throttle this even more. I don't entirely blame them as people abuse this and slow down the connection for the rest of us (and it is illegal) but they should give me the full pipe for downloading backup files and other (non-pirated) uses.

Bottom line: The upgrade is worthwhile if you have several computers all sharing the same network (home or business), do a lot of gaming or stream media (audio or video). It isn't worthwhile if you are a simple web surfer or think you can download your pirated materials any faster.

On another note, I can imagine the frustration those who use dial-up Internet in rural Thunder Bay have when surfing the web. There has been some talk about this in our local media these days with one fellow starting a petition to bring high-speed further outside of town. Hopefully they can get our local providers to move on this. I download in 1 second what takes them 5 minutes. They may as well use a cup and wire.