My God, having reliable internet is a godsend that you never think about when it works, but is intensely frustrating when it doesn't. I've been with Shaw for years now (the only other competition in Manitoba is Bell/MTS, and their max speed to my house is 25Mbps, compared to Shaw's 1 Gbps for not much more money). Shaw's system is Fiber to the node, and then Coax to all the houses in the neighbourhood, and coax in my house, obviously. I live in a house from the 70's, so you can imagine each owner has made their mark, with coax all over the place.
Anyway, for years, my Shaw internet was unreliable. It was fine if we were only using it lightly, you know, media streaming, but as soon as I'd start torrenting, and then try to log into a game server, or watch some Netflix, our internet would drop out and we'd need to reset the router. I was getting dropped from multiplayer game servers left and right. At one point, I was resetting our router daily, sometimes twice daily. We'd had a Shaw tech out a few times, but they were unable to diagnose and fix the issue. It was incredibly frustrating, and then once COVID hit and my wife started working from home, it started to impact her work. I called Shaw and gave them one more chance to fix it. The tech showed up, but because companies had freshly implemented COVID policies (this was summer of 2020), he couldn't actually come IN the house. Nevertheless, he went to the neighbourhood box and tested the connection to our house, and didn't see anything. Then he came up with the bright idea of just replacing all the COAX cable ends in line from where the cable enters the house, to where it ends at my router. He still couldn't come into the house, so he handed me the tool and a bunch of ends, demonstrated how to do it, and then I went and actually physically changed all the cable ends.
It actually worked. We've had rock solid internet now for about a year and a half, and man is it NICE. I don't even think about it any more.
