I can’t for the life of me get the extra pod to work anywhere else in my apartment. Even when I have the 2 pods in the same room I’m still getting poor-fair signal.
Is there anything else I can even do to extend my range here? These pods clearly don’t work
Did a side-by-side on my home internet recently and the results were interesting enough that I figured it was worth a writeup.
The setup at home was Cogeco for over 15 years. The plan had been on a promo rate of $59/month for a while. At some point the promo ended — with no notification, no email, no heads-up of any kind - and the rate jumped straight to $140/month. Worth noting that Cogeco's own standard rate for this plan is listed at around $99, so the bill wasn't even matching their published non-promo price. With tax it was landing at roughly $160/month.
Reached out via their chat to ask about long-term customer pricing or any kind of retention offer. The response was straightforward: no loyalty program, no tenure-based discount, no offer to match new customer rates, no explanation for why the billed rate exceeded the standard rate. Polite, but nothing on the table.
That's actually the more interesting finding here - there's no mechanism at Cogeco for rewarding long tenure, and the post-promo pricing isn't necessarily aligned with their own published rates. New customer promos exist, but once you're past the promo window, you're paying whatever the system rolls you onto.
Looked at the alternatives and oxio stood out. Worth noting: oxio was acquired by Cogeco in 2023 and runs on the same cable infrastructure. Same physical lines into the house, same underlying network - different billing entity, different pricing model.
oxio's structure:
The switch itself: Equipment arrived in a few days, self-install took about 15 minutes. Speeds match the plan. Support is chat/email only, which is a tradeoff - faster response times in my experience, but no phone option if that matters to you.
Net result: roughly a third of the previous monthly cost on what is functionally the same connection.
The takeaway from a UX/pricing perspective: The big providers' pricing is structured around acquisition, not retention. Promo-to-rack-rate transitions often happen silently, and the rack rate itself isn't always what you'd expect from their public pricing pages. Independent resellers running on the same infrastructure are increasingly competitive precisely because they're not playing that game. If you're past your promo window with Cogeco, Bell, or Rogers, it's worth at least pricing out the smaller ISPs that use the same wires — and worth checking your bill against the provider's own published rates, because they don't always match.
For anyone who does end up trying oxio, I have a referral code:
R6WNMHT - gets you a FREE first month (and me as well, full disclosure).
Happy to answer questions on the comparison if anyone's curious about specifics.
Salut tout le monde,
Petit coup de gueule contre Oxio. On m'avait vanté leur service client exceptionnel et leur approche humaine... Résultat ? Ça fait une semaine que j'essaie de leur donner mon argent et je suis prisonnière d'une boucle administrative digne des douze travaux d'Astérix.
Le contexte :
J'ai emménagé dans un bloc neuf. Mes voisins à gauche, à droite et même au bout du cul-de-sac sont admissibles. L'infrastructure passe devant ma porte, la boîte coaxiale est déjà posée sur le mur. Mais selon leur base de données automatisée : « Adresse non desservie ».
L'enfer des échanges :
J'ai parlé à Mumin, Sameia, puis Alejandra. À chaque fois, il faut recommencer l'explication.
On me demande si j'ai l'accord du propriétaire. Je réponds « OUI ».
Le lendemain ? Roboxio (leur bot) se pointe dans la chaîne de courriels pour me demander : « Hmmm, on n'a pas bien compris. Êtes-vous déjà client ? Répondez O ou N ».
Sérieusement ? Après 5 jours de courriels détaillés, de preuves de voisinage et de confirmations techniques, je me fais "ghoster" par un humain pour être relancée par un bot qui ne sait même pas qui je suis. Aucun suivi des échanges précédents et c'est à croire que leur centre de contact n'a même pas la technologie suffisante pour assurer la continuité des échanges avec leurs clients et futurs clients...
À croire que leurs clients satisfaits ont été payé pour donner des avis positifs. Mon expérience est désastreuse.
C’est dommage, parce que j’aimais leur image de marque, mais là, je jette l'éponge. Si vous avez besoin d'un service qui comprend qu'un bâtiment neuf peut exister en 2026, passez votre tour. Je m'en vais voir la concurrence qui, elle, semble vouloir de mon argent.
Est-ce qu'il y en a d'autres qui ont frappé le mur du "Roboxio" en essayant de s'abonner ?
#oxio #serviceclient #echec #internetquebec
EDITED TO ADD: i am still working from home 2 days a week. mainly just vpn access to a shared drive, emails and the very occasional teams meeting
I'm an 'old' lady who doesn't understand the upload/download speed stuff and i've looked at the last few months of my usage on my cogeco bill but it means nothing to me. i want to pay the least amount for my oxio but without sacrificing service. I'm one person, no gaming, streaming tv and music and a bit of mobile phone usage is all i do . can i get away with the $35.99 /month option?
Anyone have experience with oxio in fraser Valley, in BC Canada. Just ordered my modem and I've never had internet of my own before so I chose this one cause I see mostly good reviews but looking for real experiences and what to look for, cheers
I switched to Oxio after getting royally f-ed by telus,>!(Long story, service got cut for no reason, later found out its because my downstairs neighbor cancelled their service, and my service got cut as well for whatever reason. Left me without broadband for a week while waiting for oxio's equipment to arrive) !<, so I wanted to write a short review sharing my experience and feedback. Not sponsored and no codes here, just my experience and opinions, if your experience is different, please share them below!! I want to know how consistent their services are.
Honestly, this is probably the most painless sign up process I've ever had: address, select plan, card details, done. It's as no-BS as it gets. 1000 thumbs up on this! Signed up for the 1gbps down / 200mbps up plan>!(why not 1gbps up and down? shaw is running DOCSIS 3.1 and your modems are as well... but whatever)!<
Oxio's pricing is very reasonable (cheap even) considering you wont be locked in a contract, with no data caps and a "forever" price lock promise. I'm sure if you call up a sales rep at telus or rogers/shaw you can get a better deal, but again, with those you'll very likely be locked in a 2 yr contract and at most a 5 year price lock (with a nonzero chance of getting lied to by the sales rep), so you can kinda pick ur poison there.
Equipment was shipped on the next business day, and took a week to arrive (shipped via Purolator Ground from Toronto), service was activated on day 6, so that was painless, no waiting after it arrived.
Equipment sent:
1x Sercomm DM1000
1x Oxio WiFi Pod (Plume Superpod Wi-Fi 5)
I did have to spend a good couple hours fixing my coax run in my house since the coax run was majorly messed up (allegedly by telus tech when they installed their fiber line... Thanks Telus! That really helped my afternoon. These won't be problems you'll have to deal with if a tech is setting it up for you). BUT, once I got that figured out, the modem connected painlessly. GREAT! The plume wifi pod however.....
First of all, they are Wi-Fi 5.... its 2026 guys, we're already talking about wifi 7. YES i know in normal usage wifi 5 is perfect sufficient and even overkill for basic streaming and usage, but the latency penalty of wifi 5 vs 6 really kills the mood when you're playing online games on your laptop, ethernet does fix it but thats not all....
If you're running your modem to your wifi pod next to each other or don't have a complex ethernet run in your house, its mostly okay. You download the app, login, wait for it to connect and set it up via the app, it pretty clear and easy. And the mesh setup is essentially automatic and painless.
HOWEVER, if you have complex ethernet runs in your house, these pods will annoy you, quick. These plume superpods are cloud dependent and takes absolutely FOREVER to connect to their cloud (~10 mins), and there is no local web portal to login to so u can troubleshoot issues remotely with ethernet runs (the pod shuts down completely when there is no internet connection... WHAT??), so I have to connect my ethernet, run up back to my room, stare at the light for enough time for me to cook a quick meal, only to realize something is wrong, and I have to run down, and do it all over again.... Oxio.. if you're listening, please PLEASE either drop Plume or allow us to choose eero or plume during sign up.
After it's done tho, they work fine. It's set and forget for the most part. There ARE some security / privacy concerns with plume's internet monitoring/firewall/sense(very creepy feature imo), but they can be turned off (at least it says it's turned off), and the speeds on them are okay for wifi 5, on ethernet im getting full 1gbps on LAN.
Do note I have never used the eero system (amazon based), so I cant comment on that, from my research they're pretty bad too.
I've had zero issues with the internet so far. In BC, Oxio uses Shaw's infras, tried and true.
At night or nonpeak hours I'm getting peak 1gbps down, and around 850-950 maintained, during the day or peak hours im seeing 300-750 depending on when I do the test. Upload speeds remain a steady 170-200mbps at all times. No complaints on speed, its great.
Latency is also not bad. I use cloud gaming with Geforce Now so im very latency sensitive. regardless of the time of day, I'm getting a steady 15-18 ms connected to Nvidia's Oregon servers. On telus FTTP i was getting around 5-8 ms. Its an increase for sure, but given oxio runs coax, this is better than expected, but I wouldn't say it bad by any means.
Oxio's network routing seems to be good too, I compared Oxio's latency with and w/o cloudflare warp and it only added latency. So no complaints there, good job.
I haven't experienced any data caps or throttling despite burning through almost 2TB of traffic in 2 weeks. So their "no date cap" promise seems to be true.
My experience with CS has been great, they answered my questions fairly quickly before I signed up, and when I requested an extra wifi pod for extra coverage in the house they were quick to respond and it was sent on the next business day and arrived in a week. Zero complaints.
- My free month offer almost didn't apply the first time I tried to signed up, I had to track down another offer code to put in during sign up to get the deal, so that needs some attention.
- I wish there is an option to delete the wifi pod off the plan, just so its one less thing to forget to return. I did not have an existing AP setup at this place so I decided to stick with it, but for full nerds with a full in wall AP setup and home servers, the wifi pods is just going to get lost within a year and it'll be pricy to replace.
- As mentioned before, 1 or 2.5gbps up and down is possible with current shaw infra runs, I hope this becomes an option soon.
- Oxio's default DNS server seems to be google's 8.8.8.8/8.8.4.4, this is nice but it would be even better if it defaulted to cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 / 1.0.0.1, its faster and more private
- no ipv6 :( i know its not a big issue since NAT is still holding on but to have the ability to have multiple IPv6 Addresses assigned to devices under the same plan without port forwarding is a nice to have when you're hosting something that needs to be accessible outside the network. (like a private cloud or game server for example)
I am not planning to move out yet, but if I do and I need to cancel I will update this and share my cancelling experience.
2 questions about the supplied router modem
1- Confused by the requirement for the Eero wifi module. Does this mean all local connections are done via wifi? Is it not possible to hard wire-ethernet to the modem-router?
2- What specific brand and model of router -modem is typically supplied to new users?
Sign up with my code: RCTEX2Z
They are a really good service regardless.
to make sure it meets your needs? can you have 2 different services in your house at the same time?