TekSavvy takes pirate site blocking battle to Canada’s Supreme Court | Hacker News Reader

TekSavvy takes pirate site blocking battle to Canada’s Supreme Court

torrentfreak.com

177 pointscurmudgeon2254 comments

TekSavvy is not a great deal. But you get incredibly good tech support and they’re an honest company. I will, by principle, stay with them.

Bell just installed fibre to the side of my house for free and want to give me “2 years of 1GB symmetrical” for $35/mo CAD. Nope. Never in a million years will I do business with you, Bell.

That symmetrical 1gbps probably had a 50 GB monthly quota. If you haggle, you can get unlimited for $55/month, two year contract, without TV etc.

But yeah, I stick with Teksavvy. Only have Bell for a secondary house, where they removed their copper service...

It was unlimited. They added fibre to our entire neighbourhood and this was a special deal related to that.

I love the idea of a 50GB monthly cap on 1gbps Internet. Blow through that in under 7 minutes.

Good luck finding someone who can serve you at 1Gbps. Like seriously, I'd be curious who you've found because I never actually hit that except in speed tests :(

It's not about peak bandwidth for a single machine. It means you'll have so much bandwidth that multiple people in the house can be streaming full duplex HD video over VPN without having latency impact on those gaming at the same time.

I find that it’s generally the sender that has trouble serving 1GBPs, I’ve occasionally gotten it from my AWS instances when the result is in memory already

I get about 940 megabit down with Telus, on Vancouver Island. Not on speed tests but pulling down torrents, etc. Close enough to gigabit that I don't sweat the delta.

Yes, that's about right with overheads.

Steam is the one I've found that can really saturate a connection. But be warned, because with how it distributes some games using compression your CPU & SSD might be the bottleneck.

In 6 months they will raise the price as the contract allows.

No I have the same. It’s regular priced plan, discounted by half for everyone in the building for the first two years. There are no ways in the contract to raise the price before that.

They raise the base price of the package.

https://forums.redflagdeals.com/bell-internet-price-increase...

Yep one more reason to hate Bell. You have to haggle regularly, their sales people lie and do tricks, they constantly break their own contracts. It's a full time job.

TekSavvy is 95% hampered by the fact that they run on other uncooperative providers' last mile and middle mile infrastructure (Telus, Bell, Shaw, etc). The 3rd parties only give them the barest minium of cooperation which the federal government forces them to give.

They are for the most part not what you would call a facilities based ISP. It's not a choice I would make, operating an ISP, because it totally removes from your control and the ability to know what's really going on with the last and middle mile segments to your customers.

I'm sure that if somebody gave the owners of TekSavvy 400 million dollars and they went to hire GPON last mile experts and build their own networks in sufficiently population-dense parts of Canada, they would do pretty good with it. But that seems unlikely.

Teksavvy is actually building out their own FTTH around the town/city they're headquartered in:

* https://www.teksavvy.com/in-the-news/2021-press-releases/tek...

* https://mobilesyrup.com/2021/08/03/teksavvy-launches-fibre-n...

In the same vein: given the condo boom in Toronto/GTA, there are companies whose 'niche' is that they run fibre to various developments, pre- and post-construction, and offer high-speed Internet:

* https://www.canadianbusiness.com/innovation/condo-owners-are...

* https://www.beanfield.com/residential/

* https://www.fibrestream.ca

Fibre, and GePON particularly is noticeably cheaper to both install, and operate than copper.

You need to have really a lot of existing copper to keep staying at it to have any hope to pay it off.

All "3rd world" countries in recent memory I've been all had either LX to premises, or some kind of PON.

You can now get a gigabit even in places like Pakistan.

That's because 3rd world countries start from scratch. Developed countries have 50-year-old infrastructure to consider. Can't dig 50 centimetres into the ground without hitting something important.

Well, developed countries to the large extend already have fibre in every major city, it's just getting to it is near impossible for mortals, take a look on the post above how the guy in Toronto kept begging big ISPs to lease him fibre.

Developed countries have fibre between every major city, and through every major city, but they have only been pushing fibre out in the 'first/last-mile' in the last few years:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_to_the_x

For the last few decades it has been copper, either twisted-pair or co-axial, to just about everywhere.

We are not talking about the last mile, since it's the easiest part in comparison to the developing world, and with regards to getting the right of way.

It's the intra-city fibre backbone which is either non-existent in the developing world, or extremely hard to get connection rights to in the developed countries.

Having been burned by Bell and Rogers' in the past, I gladly pay the premium to TekSavvy. Knowing that some of that extra money goes towards suing Bell and fighting the CRTC makes me sleep soundly at night.

Lets share our Bell/Rogers stories..

Long ago i cancelled Bell because they would not stop the constant telemarketing calls and I wanted a new phone number and this was my only option.

After i did this, they sent me a bill for $660 in long distance charges. Turned out after "cancelling and re-enabling" they did not put me back on the "free long distance plan".

The $660 bill should have been closer to $90 which i was more then willing to pay.

They still come to my door from time to time, trying to sell me services. After doing this to me do they really think I will ever use them again?

Bell's problem is they still think it is 1970, and they hold all the cards and you MUST use them as there are no other options.

Do you get an actual publicly-routable IPv4 address (static or dynamic), or is CGNAT all they will provide now?

I'm curious what the ISP situation in Canada is like. East Asia is almost entirely CGNAT, for example.

I'm in Canada (BC) and have always had a dynamic IP, across ~4 different ISPs in the last several years. I think that's typical, we have a pretty good number of allocated IP addresses per person.

Every Canadian wireline ISP, as far as I'm aware, issues routable IPv4 addresses to all customers. Usually dynamic, but the leases are generally very long.

I'm with Start.ca, they're similar to Teksavvy in that they lease Rogers' cable lines. They're not doing CGNAT and I believe the CEO, who's very active on DSLReports, has confirmed they have no plans to start doing it.

Im on teksavy, i have a dynamic ip, although it seems to change rather rarely.

I've never had CGNAT in canada with any isp, but maybe i just got lucky.

I have a publicly routable dynamic ipv4 but it hasn’t changed in at least a year.

I have Bell fibe but keep Teksavvy around as an automatic failover. Not just for practical reasons but I would like to give them money for advocacy but can't really stomach the objectively worse connectivity (not their fault).

Kudos!

Here in Canada's smallest province Bell has repeatedly promised for 20 years or more to build the infrastructure for better rural Internet. They've stalled, taken government funding, occasionally make mediocre upgrades of their barely usable service.

Now tired of waiting rural residents are installing Starlink at about 50 to 100 installs per week (anecdotal). Rural residents are going from "up to 1Mbps" (and poor support) to 250Mbps down/50Mbps up 50ms latency. By the end of the year Bell is going to be wiped out in rural areas.

Like you say even if it's 1Gbps and $35 it's just not worth it. Bell is a horrible company to deal with.

> By the end of the year Bell is going to be wiped out in rural areas.

Seems like that might play into Bell's hand though. They've successfully grifted billions of CAD to build stuff out in rural areas, haven't done so, and can now with a straight face say "See, they don't want it!"

That just means the grift ends. It’s not really favourable to Bell.

It is favourable because they still get to keep that money. If you robbed a bank, and when they caught you, they let you keep the money and walk away, you'd call that pretty favourable.

Thanks for that. I am with you all the way.

So yes, some are good. I had an issue where Rogers decided my modem didn't meet their channel bonding spec and capped me at 75ish Mbps silently even though I was paying for 150 even when I changed to a new modem with more channels. Teksavvy wanted to roll a tech (no matter the arguments and speculation about Rogers being a bad actor) at the height of the pandemic (disadvantages of being a reseller). I ended up having to change to a higher tier then back to prove it was a provisioning issue that Rogers had manually put in by forcing a reprovisioning.

Agreed. TekSavvy customer for many years now, will always do what i can to support such an amazing company.

while every other ISP was folding, teksavvy stood up and said it will not hand over customer names without a proper court order.

Actually they probably want to give you “2 years of 1GB symmetrical” for $35/mo CAD*

*with a 2yr contract, regular price of $79.95/mo after the first 3 months etc etc

I am always proud to have TekSavvy as my ISP. It can be a pain getting a ticket requiring a tech to be sent out since they lease Roger's lines in my area, but it's a small price to pay for being the customer of someone that stands up for its users and the internet as a whole.

Me too and I want to support them. Please give them a good review on google - they currently sit at 2.3 stars.

I will do so right now.

edit And done, 5 stars.

Furthermore, their staff have continually been the most friendly, kind and resourceful folks I've ever encountered as a customer of any business. I worked with them to diagnose a neighborhood DSL issue years ago, and it really felt like working with some colleagues or friends, despite the customer/business relationship.

At one point I was even getting internet for free from all my referrals.

Their staff really are great, I love how active they all are on DSLReports.

Ditto. They're the only ISP I've used that's automatically LOWERED their price at several times in the past, in response to certain developments (including the courts ruling in their favour about fees paid to the upstream ISP).

Plus, none of their sales tactics are as slimy as RoBellCos.

Hopefully one day they can offer a fibre option. But until then, they'll continue to be my ISP of choice.

> If a site-blocking order is an available remedy, what analytical framework governs its use, and how must this framework account for the impact of such an order on freedom of expression?

On the one hand, it's unreasonable to expect a court to specify a perfect algorithm for determining which sites can and can't be blocked, but on the other hand, the fact that such a dangerous remedy has been invented by the judicial branch, with no clear guidance from the legislature, suggests that the system needs to "fail open" by protecting fundamental rights, until the government can pass a law that gives some parameters to how this censorship power may be used.

I'm not sure how you read that as them asking for a literal algorithm (never mind a perfect one). They're talking to the courts, and they literally used the phrase "analytical framework." They're clearly asking for defined standards - who has the right to make such requests, what evidence do they need to provide, what actions can the court take in response, and how certain do they need to be in order to do so, etc. All basic ways the court does things, they're just asking for a set standard rather upfront rather than letting an organic hodgepodge form and then eventually congeal.

TekSavvy's blog/newsletter is usually an interesting read.

https://blogs.teksavvy.com/topic/choice-words

>https://blogs.teksavvy.com/look-at-this-picture-then-look-at...

Yup, this is exactly what I'm paying for by subscribing to TekSavvy.

Following a complaint from major media companies Rogers, Bell and TVA, the Court ordered several major ISPs to block

Absolutely wild. The way I'm reading it this was not a court case where the site was sued and lost. A rights holder company filed a complaint and the court just said "sure" and ordered private companies to censor the internet. No trial, no evidence, no nothing. Holy shit.

That is not what happened.

Goldtv did not file a response to the statement of claim and went far enough to avoid answering to rights holders that the judge mentioned it in the order. In Canada, if you don’t file a response to a statement of claim, you waive your right to present evidence and the plaintiff’s evidence is evaluated as sworn. The original defendant failed to defend itself and then decided to ignore two straight injunctions.

I’ve heard all sorts of people say that Canadian courts aren’t anything to worry about. They are serious…

Here is the order:

https://www.canlii.org/en/ca/fct/doc/2019/2019fc1432/2019fc1...

Thank you. The article didn't make that very evident.

I agree with you - the article seemed to jump to the conclusion without going through context. If you regularly run into the Canadian system, bookmark canlii - it’s an incredible site and you can drill down to read through history or up to read commentary!

Thanks for being kind!! This has been fun! :)

I like TekSavvy, but they have no gigabit offering. Upload is way too low.

On how things seem to currently stand in Canada:

TekSavvy, and other "independents", are reliant on the incumbent telcos and cablecos for physical infrastructure. They independents can access this infrastructure by paying a fee regulated by the CRTC (~FCC).

The independents say that the currently approved fee for access to FTTH is too high, and that they cannot offer high-bandwidth services in a profitable manner over incumbent last-mile infrastructure.

Teksavvy's various regulatory submissions:

* https://www.teksavvy.com/policies/regulatory/regulatory-subm...

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