I have been an internet customer of Izzi since I moved to this house in the autumn of 2017. At that time I picked Izzi because it was much less expensive than its major competitor TotalPlay. For the next several years, I was a very happy customer of Izzi — they kept giving me higher speeds than I was paying for, the service was infallible, and customer service was a dream. I had no reason to look elsewhere.

But in the last year or so, I started to have daily micro outages that culminated in a 36-hour national outage that told me it was time to reexamine my loyalty to Izzi. This major outage was only the third in nearly eight years, but the lack of comment and updates from Izzi about this major interruption was unlike the company I’d known to this point. A little research told me that a change of modem would likely fix the intermittent short outages, so I contacted them to schedule this service. I was shocked when I was told “Oh, there’s been an issue with our cabling in your area for a while and we’re working on fixing that, so we’re not addressing individual client concerns at this time.” Excuse me? What was with this new Canadian-telco-like lassitude?!

I did some research and discovered that TotalPlay was now a better deal than Izzi. I could get the same type of package — phone, cable, internet — for the same price, but with five times the download speeds and twenty-five times the upload speeds! I promptly scheduled TotalPlay for the next day… and they were a no-show.

This left me with two other providers to consider, TelMex and Starlink. This was the first time in my life that I had meaningful competition within the same country’s telecom providers. I’d left Telus for Verizon once, but the switch from Bell Mobility to SaskTel was like changing the proverbial quatre trente sous pour une piastre as Bell Mobility used SaskTel’s network.

Starlink was immediately rejected as I didn’t move to an urban area to have spotty satellite service, so that left TelMex as the third real choice. I went on an expat forum as well as my neighbourhood Facebook group and asked others for their recent experiences. The majority of the stories were the same, TotalPlay installation can be difficult to schedule, but after that, the service is great. TelMex will set you up quickly, but leave you without service for weeks, similar to Canadian telco service levels. So I rescheduled TotalPlay, and this second time, they showed up.

The tech was pretty friendly. I explained my current setup and asked if we could just reuse Izzi’s cabling. He said yes and no, that he had to bring in his own cables to the TotalPlay equipment, but if after I left I wanted to disconnect additional cabling from the Izzi modem and plug it into the TotalPlay modem, I could, but that couldn’t happen when he was there for Reasons. With Izzi, I had “entradas” in the living room for the TV and the master Deco of my mesh system, one in the guest room for guests to hardwire, and then the main line leading to the modem in my office. He was replacing two of those, office and living room, so that just left the guest room that I could hopefully still use with Izzi’s cabling plugged into TotalPlay’s modem. I was also only allowed two entradas, so that eliminated my request for him to add a third upstairs. I asked him to run the office entrada where I have my current mess of wires but requested that he change the location of the entrada in the living room so I could flip my furniture! Side note here that I am going to have to do a post about that because, wow, the change was so impactful as to be almost equivalent to moving!

Satisfied that we had a plan and that my mesh network would continue to serve me, I let him work… for six hours. When he came to my office, I went to the living room and moved furniture around. By the time that was done, he was ready to set up the TV and the new cable box. I use an Apple TV device, and like with Izzi, there are conflicts between the cable box and the Apple TV, so I can’t have both plugged in at the same time. My Apple TV is ancient and on the fritz, so a project in the near-term is to reexamine if I even need an Apple TV or if I can get all my streaming apps (including Apple TV+) through the Izzi cable box. If so, then that’ll simplify things greatly. But in the meantime, he set up a switch for me to make it easier to go between both services. What I like about the cable box is that it came with a bonus speaker. My Samsung TV audio is really not great and the speaker really makes a difference, so I’m motivated to switch to the cable box.

The switch also enabled us to hard wire my Apple TV and main Deco (with my own ethernet cords). To our immense surprise, the Deco just switched to the new service without my having to set up my mesh network again! So I still have the main house network name and password that, while secure, is MUCH easier to type in than the TotalPlay password. That just left my Ring doorbell to set up, which is a whole Thing that involves a repeater and yet another network… but that network also did not need to be set up again! The switchover ended up being so much easier than I expected, even if I have a lot of excess cabling to deal with.

The surprises kept coming, though. Not satisfied with just giving me a bonus speaker and switch, the tech pulled out a phone as well, which was most certainly not included in the installation. It’s identical to the phone Izzi gave me, but I knew they’d want theirs back as it was part of the installation package. I thought we were done at this point, but the tech had a final surprise. I’m not sure how he did this without my noticing, but… he had installed a third entrada upstairs, with a Wi-Fi repeater! I now have excellent service upstairs for the first time. Before, I could just barely connect to my mesh system. I ended the day giving the tech twice the tip I’d initially planned to give him.

I lived with the new service for a few weeks and it worked great, so it was time to cancel Izzi, and I wanted to do that before my next bill. I kept putting it off because it involved a phone call and going to the office in person, but today being the day before the next bill was set to be issued, I had to get on this task! I called and got through the phone tree easily thanks to all the steps being printed on the website. There was a 10-minute wait to speak to a rep, so I took the option to have them call me back, which they did within the promised 10 minutes.

The rep I finally got ahold of spoke very quickly, but I only had to ask him to repeat himself twice in the whole call, so it wasn’t too difficult of a task to deal with him. He tried to do the retention spiel on me, and I cut him off saying that tech support didn’t want to retain me as a client and I already have new service installed, so it’s too late. To his credit, he stopped talking and said he was going to put me on hold while he generated a folio number for me to take to a branch in person to return my equipment. That was a quick wait, and he slowed down enough for me to catch the very long folio number in one try. He then told me I had to go to the office today, confirming that my new invoice will be generated tonight so I’d have to pay $1,000 when today my account balance was zero. So that was very kind of him, more like the Izzi customer service I’m used to.

I then quickly packed up the modem, phone, cable box, and remote control, then headed to the nearest Izzi office, which is at Gran Plaza. I did not have to wait to see someone there, but I did have to wait for a manager to go through my last technical support chat. She was Not Happy. I hope the tech doesn’t lose her job! I knew that day that I should have probably escalated the call and Izzi would have given me the moon, but I’d already made the decision to switch and TotalPlay was just better value at that point, so it is what it is.

As I was heading upstairs from the Izzi office to get tacos in the food court, I was stopped by a TotalPlay rep wanting to sign me up for service! I told her I’m already a customer, and she told me to remember the booth is there if I ever have any issues. Really, other than that blip with Izzi tech support, telecom service in this country has been a dream after the absolute nightmare that was dealing with telecom in Canada!