In a bizarre turn of events, I was able to increase the bandwidth of our home Internet from 20/2 to 100/10 by paying $2.95 more per month.
We’ve had Eastlink Internet here for a long time; so long, it seems, that our account type—”Edge” with 20 Mbps down and 2 Mbps up for $82.95/month—was “grandfathered.”
By paying the $2.95 more per month, we get ungrandfathered and move up to 100 down and 10 up, with no equipment change.
There was some suggestion from technical support that to do so would require using Eastlink’s wifi, but that doesn’t appear to be the case: all I needed to do was switch our AirPort Extreme from “DHCP and NAT” to “bridge” mode.
Comments
We had the same experience with Rogers. It seems like a really inefficient model - your plan is grandfathered and you only find out about upgrades you're entitled to by shopping around or complaining about your speed. It seems to me that telecoms would benefit greatly from a more software-oriented model, where updates are pushed to users and often contain new features or improvements aimed at making the experience better proactively.