In our neighbourhood Telus crews have over the summer been installing fiber to each house. So after being with Shaw for so many years I decided to try it. For a 2 year contract the service includes Essentials channels plus 6 theme packs, 4K 1TB pvr, internet 150 and home phone for $101 for 1 year, $161 after 1 year and $176 after 2 years, plus a $150 credit on the first bill and $10 ongoing discount after the 2 years. Pretty attractive, right?
So I thought until it was installed and I found too many things I didn't like:
1. I kept seeing too much motion blur and compression noise. My tv is an LG 43LF5400. Not a top model but decent. I never saw these artifacts on Shaw. For all Telus' touted bandwidth the compression is really bad.
2. The channel guide is godawful.
-way too busy
-lettering is huge and a waste of space
-you can only see maybe 5 channels on a page (not sure of the exact number as I disconnected the service). The other features like different guide styles etc etc didn't do it for me. I much prefer the Shaw guide for the ease of scanning a page that shows 10 channels by 2 hours at once.
-the present tv channel plays in the background which for my wife and I is a huge annoyance
-The Telus guide is way too cluttered with On Demand channels. I had to program them out to be able to more easily scroll through the guide. Shaw shows those channels with a simple left click on the channels that support On Demand
-the restart live tv feature sucks. Don't try to back up because you can't go forward again. "Skip/fast forward disabled by broadcaster" Huh? Guess they really want you to watch those commercials.
-No clock on the front of the pvr. A small point but we really find it useful.
Overall I much prefer Shaw's simplicity and ease of use and many of those functions are available with the Shaw guide. Other people might enjoy all that complexity in the Telus guide.
Even considering the better channel selection compared to our Shaw package, we prefer to stay away from Telus. On the other hand, the internet 150 is nice, although my older computers only have 10/100 ports. To do a speed test I had to run two simultaneously. One was getting 95 mbps, the other 45. But what's the use? I'm not doing much streaming anyway.
I must say the Telus installer Chris was thoroughly professional, careful and did neat, tidy work. And he was helpful with an introduction to the service.
I told Shaw I was looking at Telus and to retain me as a customer they offered $50 bucks off for 1 year, a greater number of channels and internet 75. So I went for it. Not the huge discount that Telus offers but no contract either. I tested the Internet 75 and it's better than advertised at about 85 mbps.
'Nuff said.
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