Review by Mark Rejhon 
UPDATED: 249 days ago
member for 4.8 years, 205 visits, last login: 46 days ago
 Ottawa,ON
 $79 per month (month by month)
 about 3 days
 Bell Canada
 "Reliability, low latency, massive bandwidth, zero downtime switching DSL service"
 "Virtually none so far"
 "I keep switching back to Magma from Rogers, Sympatico, I*Stop, etc."
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Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
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Been with Magma at various time since 1995 in the dialup and ISDN days. More recently, last year, 2003, I decided to switch back to Magma from I*Stop. I already had my own DSL modem (Alcatel Speedtouch Home DSL Ethernet). Here goes...
What did I order, What do I have...
I ordered the Magma 3 Mbps Premium DSL service (soon to be 4 Mbps in March 2004 at no extra charge). The cost is $64.95 per month plus $15 static IP address. PPPoE is required for all residential DSL connections in Ottawa. However, I had my own router (BEFW11S4) and my own DSL modem (Alcatel Speedtouch Home DSL). I have a LAN of several computers are more than one switch, and also a hardware firewall.
Seamless Switch...
After three business days later (normally fiive, all I had to do was change the PPPoE password and I was on Magma. That was a 100% seamless switch. Apparently in Ottawa, you can have multiple DSL providers simultaneously on the same phone line -- all you need to do is change your PPPoE username and password. You do not even need to cancel your previous DSL provider first if you are switching to Magma! One minute I was on I*Stop, and the next minute I was on Magma, just by changing the PPPoE username and password via my Linksys BEFW11S4 router. If you attempt a seamless DSL switch, make sure you do not cancel your old ISP first. Sign up for the new DSL ISP anyway and let them know you haven't cancelled your old account yet. This will allow you to switch DSL services with no downtime! (At least for Magma). I didn't need to be on the phone with the Customer Service for very long to get my Magma account set up, and I don't remember any of my occasional phone calls to Magma ever lasting more than a few minutes. I don't remember ever being on hold waiting for a CSR when I call Magma, but I haven't needed to call them back much since installation. They seem to have the equivalent of Level 2 Tech Support directly manning the phone lines, rather than untrained Level 1 people reading from lists. With such people on the phone, one can wonder who's left at Magma to keep the equipment running as reliably as they do.
Minor Gripe....
One of my minor gripes is that when I edit my email addresses using Magma's online email editing tools, such as to create a new mailbox or forward email to another mailbox, the changes tend to take effect on approximately 10 minute intervals. I'd prefer the changes to take effect immediately - I appreciate being able to create temporary email addresses instantly, but I would love to be able to use them instantly too without waiting a few minutes for this to take effect. However, most ISP's don't even let you edit your email addresses online nor even allow you to create aliases for your email addresses. This otherwise 4.5 out of 5 stars rating for "Services" by this, is thus rounded up to 5 stars. Also because this review system doesn't let me select a fractional star for a ratings category.
Special Notes:
This review may be outdated by March 2003. I got an announcement from Magma that they're upgading the 1.5 Mbps DSL to 3.0 Mbps (which seems to be 3.5 Mbps actual), and upgrading the 3.0 Mbps to 4.0 Mbps. This is a result to the competition by Rogers Canada offering the new Premium 5 Mbps offering. I think the DSL services are all doing the same (probably coordinated by Bell Canada who operates Sympatico and must resell DSL lines to local ISP's). All the local DSL providers are all going to be providing the same upgraded speeds. Actually, I suspect the actual speed of the 4.0 Mbps will be faster than 4.0 Mbps since I am located downtown and because Rogers is going to be 5.0 Mbps. Magma have tended to lowball their 3.5 Mbps DSL service as being 3.0 Mbps via their website.. The G.DMT compliant DSL modems are capable of up to 7 Mbps. I'm wondering if my speeds will actually be uncapped? Downtown users might get close to that. Time will see, I'll update my review if needed...
Connection Reliability...
The startling standout category is Connection Reliability. I give Connection Reliability the maximum possible rating. It is so dramatically better than past experiences with other ISP's, that the should be six stars out of five. Magma Connection Reliability is so good as to provide a new benchmark that literally re-ranges a 4-to-5-star ratings for my past ISP's down to 3-4 stars, merely to keep it proportional with my 5-star rating of Magma. Had I been excited about the other ISP's to post reviews. (Some oldtimers may remember me being one of the first Canadians to write about ADSL experiences in Canada back in 1997, of my first experiences with Sympatico's early Weststell FlexCap 2.2 Mbps RADSL service. Google for "Rejhon ADSL Report" at groups.google.com). No other ISP other than Magma since 1997 that I have used ever came close to that famous 2.2 Mbps down / 1 Mbps upload RADSL non-PPPoE service that Sympatico eventually discontinued in favour of the early Nortel 1 Mbps PPPoE modems which were much-hated by Sympatico users. Even the early widely-loved beta 2.2 Mbps high speed service has to be downrated down to 4-stars compared to Magma today. The rest of this review focuses solely on the various sub-categories of Connection Reliability: Downtime, Download Reliability, Latency, and VoIP, to justify my rating of Magma's own Connection Reliability.
Connection Reliability: Downtime...
Up to now, almost a year since I switched back to Magma, I have had virtualy no downtime. Although in the suburbs, the cable modem signal may be more reliable if you are far from the switch office, my DSL signal downtown is a nonissue and there are absolutely no retrains at all here. Magma has seven backbones and peers at two near-local locations (OTTIX and TORIX). One of the reasons I wanted to switch back to Magma is because I like their multihomed backbone. Back when I switched back, I was impressed they were connected to five backbones. I just checked their website again recently and they seem to have added some more backbones for a grand total of 810 Mbps aggregate bandwidth just for a local independent ISP that's not a telco or cable company. This helps me to have nearly zero downtime, and any that happened were 3:00am preventative maintenance or a telco switch upgrade session that I never noticed because I wasn't around. (I think one time I did, because I stayed up really late!). I work at home, because I am self employed, so I am on the Internet all day. One time I had downtime because I screwed up using a different Ethernet card MAC address during a home network upgrade. (This downtime was really my fault - I later learned that I just had to power cycle my DSL modem - from a quick 2 minute call to Magma made after midnight). I think they're better than four-nines reliability now during the hours that I actually use the Internet. Magma still worked during the Great Blackout 2003 over dialup from laptop. (The DSL signal was probably dead for everybody).
Connection Reliability: Download Reliability...
In my opinion, download reliability and consistency is more important than download speed. Magma advertises their premium DSL service as being 3.0 Mbps download and 640 Kbps upload. However, they are all really 3.5 Mbps download and 800 Kbps upload (I*Stop markets it this way). My download speeds on Magma consistently goes beyond 350 kilobytes per second even during midday, regardless of whether it's a Windows Update, Norton Antivirus update, Linux download, most Download.com downloads, and a great many other sites. The fastest speeds have hit about 375 kilobytes per second, though most downloads average about 350-360 kilobytes per second - that's full kiloBYTES rather than kiloBITS, with a full 8 bits per 1 byte. My uploads have hit as much as 87 kilobytes per second, and consistently exceeded 80 kilobytes per second. With other providers such as Sympatico, I*Stop, Rogers, download speeds tend to be all over the map such as a (300, 250, 200, 150, 100, 100, 100, 75, 50, 25) sampling for 10 different sites as a rough illustration of my point. In contrast, Magma tends to show results such as (370, 360, 355, 350, 340, 330, 300, 250, 100, 50). Essentially, 8 out of 10 major corporate sites that I tried, tend to rocket past 200 kilobytes per second. In contrast, with other ISP's only about 3 out of 10 sites rocket past 200 kilobytes per second. My tests done on major overseas sites such as ftp.funet.fi and ftp.telepac.pt have given of over 350 kilobytes per second. That is an overseas download that pretty much fully saturated my DSL connection. I play a special trick whenever I download a new big videogame demo or patch that's over 50 megabytes in size: I click on an overseas download site (instead of recommended local site). That way, that download site is usually lightly loaded rather than an overloaded North America download site. I usually get faster speeds that way, especialy since the overseas site is usually in a timezone that puts it at 5:00am local time. With Magma, the distance to the site is meaningless as long as it's a major site already connected to some big backbone over there, and that the site is in a timezone that's lightly loaded. Last year, I downloaded Max Payne 2 Demo at a whopping 350 kilobytes per second from some far away site that most North Americans avoided clicking on. No fussing with overloaded local mirrors. In this case, Magma really gave me the freedom to choose any well-connected site based on their load regardless of how far they were -- without confining me to geographical boundaries. Download rarely cut off in the middle, if at all, with Magma. It also becomes useful when I have to transfer big files to a far-away client for my business, too.
Connection Reliability: Latency...
From my experience among Rogers, Sympatico, and I'Stop .... it appears Magma greatly outperforms all of these for average latency to sites on the Internet. Some places like Google surf instantly - clicking between links and buttons happen nearly instantly just as if all their pages were saved locally to hard disk. It's like having your own T1, T3, or even OC3 connection directly to your home in terms of latency because the latency of your DSL modem is almost meaningless with Magma, and the packet error rate is virtually zero to Magma, and to many sites on the same backbones as Magma. It gets a bit addicting too easily.
Connection Reliability: Voice Over IP (VoIP)...
Recently this January 2004, I installed a Primus TalkBroadband VoIP phone line ($20 per month local phone number plus $20 per month unlimited long distance North-America-wide). I am only 7 hops away from the VoIP gateway and only 17 milliseconds ping away. I did a test phone call and measured the packet error rate (PER) and found zero lost packets over a 15-minute period. This was even while I was making downloads that fully saturated the connection. I even only had the D-Link VoIP adaptor connected to a spare LAN port on my router which even meant that my VoIP was competing with my PC for bandwidth and unable to use QoS. It seems that you don't even need QoS for VoIP on Magma because Magma's is apparently reliable enough for zero-packet-error-rate VoIP to TalkBroadband without QoS! (Important: This is not a TalkBroadband review, but on how Magma is able to make it reliable. TalkBroadband still has some glitches/disadvantages such as incorrect 800 number routing and lack of 411/911 service.)
Credentials Verification:
Google for my last name Rejhon.
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EDIT: I am no longer with Magma. Please go to Teksavvy -- they are better than Primus who took over Magma. I left Primus last year.
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