Hey, sooo I'm moving for the first time into my new apartment this coming September, meaning I'll have to set up my cable and internet myself. I'm going to be signing up with Cogeco, but I'm not exactly sure what the best options are...which is why I'm directing my question towards you off-campus students who have gone through what I'm going through. There's this thing that Cogeco offers where you can build your own bundle.. I was just wondering what Cable TV and Internet options you guys have and if you'd recommend it.

For Cable TV there's: Classic Cable, Analogue Value Pack, Digital Select 1 and High-Definition TV. My room mate and I definitely won't need HDTV, but does Classic Cable include all the basics (CTV, MTV, Global, MuchMusic, etc)?

For Internet there's: High speed internet lite, lite plus, standard, and pro. What would you say is the best choice for us students? I'm thinking standard, but I dont want to spend more money on that if the lite package is just as suitable.

Any help would be much appreciated!

I'm in a house with 6 people and we use standard with Cogeco. Haven't had any problems before with going over the bandwidth

If it's just you and one other person than the lite is definitely enough. I had it the year that just went by and never had any problems at all.

And I had just the classic cable as well and it included all the regular channels. I don't remember exactly what it didn't include but it definitely had stuff like CTV, ABC, muchmusic, global and others. I can't think of them all lol. It didn't include MTV though.

Have you tried Cogeco's website? They have tons of information there.

Classic cable does not include any specialty channels. It includes...

TVO
Global
OMNI.1
CBS
CBC
CityTV
CTV
TV Cogeco
FOX
AChannel
CTS
YTV
CBC
OMNI.2
The Weather Network
PBS
Cpac
Slice
Vision TV
TFO
TVA
CTV News Net
Treehouse
APTN
Viva
TSN
E!
SunTV
ABC
NBC
BNN

Much Music, Spike, Discovery, etc. come with the Analogue Value Pack. You won't find MTV until you get into digital.

I lived in a house with 7 people altogether and we just had the basic internet and cable packages. We only had problems with going over bandwidth a couple of time but the downloading in our house was kinda high. It all depends on your needs. Like alyssa said, if its only 2 people then the lite internet package should be more than enough. We have decided to upgrade to the digital cable this year because split 7 ways the difference is only a few dollars per person but the standard package has pretty much all the channels you need. The year before that, we went with Bell for our internet as they had a student package which was cheap and had no bandwidth limit, although their service would go down every once few months. We didn't have cable then which isn't too bad considering you can pretty much watch any show you want online nowadays.

Originally Posted by alyssabriere

If it's just you and one other person than the lite is definitely enough. I had it the year that just went by and never had any problems at all.

Did you find that your internet connection was a bit slower, compared to the speed you get on campus? I'm a pretty impatient person when it comes to waiting for pages to load and whatnot lol

I never noticed it being any slower than on campus. Everything loaded really quickly.

This past year I was in a house of five (which usually ended up being eight including partners)...and in December we exceeded our bandwidth for the first time. Second term we did so again twice. We found a few days before we would receive a cut in our service our download speed was terrible and we would loose our connection a lot.

Go with CLASSIC cable, and STANDARD internet. It's what we went with and it suited the house just fine. 6 person house. Didn't watch much TV... since we tend to watch all our shows online now a days anyways. If I could go back I would have just taken the PRO internet and cancelled TV. TV is expensive and costs more than internet!! You can just watch your shows online at watchtvsitcoms.com or surfthechannel.com or through the station's websites like ctv.ca anyways.

The Internet I found to be quite fast and I was able to play games online with little to no lag. It's basically as fast as school, maybe a tad slower. We had a few times where we had issues of it going really slow, but a call into Cogeco support and they were able to fix it pretty fast.

Note: Our bill steadily increased over the year we had service with Cogeco. The internet and tv packages went up in price without notice. We called and they said it was an 'introductory' offer we had at the beginning... so make sure you read exactly what you're buying and what 'offer' you're getting so they don't raise it on you later. Goodluck!!

PRICING

High Speed Internet Standard $52.95 ⁄ month
Classic Cable $27.99 /month

Rates off their website. We found the TV price skyrocket later a few months into our plan. Not sure why exactly, may have been because our house had to be upgraded to digital cable? Be sure to confirm with them if your location can have the analog option.

You should get TV if you are an avid sports fan. There is nothing better than watching live sports. Re-runs aren't as exciting, except for highlights of course.

I was fine without TV last year to be honest -- but I don't watch sports of course :]

Does anyone know if Cogeco is faster than Bell or Rogers? I absolutely hated Bell haha. My family back home has Rogers which is generally really fast.

Originally Posted by feonateresa

I was fine without TV last year to be honest -- but I don't watch sports of course :]

Does anyone know if Cogeco is faster than Bell or Rogers? I absolutely hated Bell haha. My family back home has Rogers which is generally really fast.

Cogeco is about equivalent to Rogers (since they're almost the same people). Bell is a bit slower.

But in all honesty, all those companies are garbage. You're better off going to one of their subletters like TekSavvy. The internet is the same as Bell's speeds, but there is no download limit (or at least a really high one) and it's cheaper.

Cogeco tends to get ridiculously expensive when they add in all these stupid fees for exceeding their limits (which are in themselves ridiculously low for this day in age).

Originally Posted by Ownaginatios

Cogeco is about equivalent to Rogers (since they're almost the same people). Bell is a bit slower.

But in all honesty, all those companies are garbage. You're better off going to one of their subletters like TekSavvy. The internet is the same as Bell's speeds, but there is no download limit (or at least a really high one) and it's cheaper.

Cogeco tends to get ridiculously expensive when they add in all these stupid fees for exceeding their limits (which are in themselves ridiculously low for this day in age).

I second this. I'm planning on switching from Cogeco soon since they are enforcing their bandwidth limits by charging $2.50/Gig over your limit. Im on the 10GB cap right now and its impossible to stay under unless all you do is check your emails or browse the internet. If you download heavily(ie. movies, songs), watch youtube, have a game console online etc. its impossible to stay under especially if more than 2 people are using the internet. You should consider TekSavvy
http://teksavvy.com/en/resdsl.aspID=7&mID=1http://teksavvy.com/en/resdsl.asp?ID=7&mID=1 since they offer 200GB cap and 5Mb/s download speed. You get a larger cap and faster speed (5x) for the same price of Cogeco's LITE package.