Alrighty, this should be fun! So I've had the pleasure of...

[JuuliusWheezer]

Alrighty, this should be fun! So I've had the pleasure of working for both of these companies (Uptown and Cloverdale offices for Shaw, Downtown Victoria office for Telus) and while both companies have their merits, there's a lot of misinformation here, and people further using that misinformation to make certain deals sound better than they are. 

Fiber to the Node, which is what Shaw uses, can be fine for most people. You're absolutely right in that the coaxial lines carrying the signal to and from the node and the home are private to each individual home. However, due to a single fiber being able to transmit multiple independent home signals by sending them down the line at different frequencies (kind of like how radio stations occupy the same airspace but use different frequencies that you need to tune into to detect). It's made complete sense that they did this in the past. If a node can serve say 10 people, you need to run fibre to one tenth as many locations. The existing coaxial connections from the nodes to all the homes are already there, so it's not much work on your part.

But all they did was buy time. No matter what the maximum up and down throughput they run to each node, no matter how much fibre is allocated to each one, copper coaxial connections have a bandwidth limit that is much lower than a single fibre. So in the end they will have to do exactly the same thing that Telus is doing, which is pulling up all of the last mile cables and replacing them with fibre. Whole apartment buildings have to be retrofitted, whole municipalities will be stuck waiting to upgrade while Shaw negotiates how it's going to upgrade its infrastructure, all of the same problems that Telus and any other ISP has been dealing with. As of when I worked for Shaw, it had over 3 million customers. Even if half of those (very unlikely) already had fibre lines running in their homes and had a fibre line ready to be lit up by Shaw at a moment's notice, That is still 1.5 million INDIVIDUAL upgrades they have to make to homes in order to surpass the coaxial bandwidth limit.

Now some of you might be thinking, "But DOCSIS 3.1 can do multiple gigabit speeds! I'll be fine for a while." And in an ideal situation, you'd be correct. But then, if they have DOCSIS 3.1 capable hardware in the hands of their customers (they do), then why are their upload speeds so slow? Why can they only give decent download speeds, when Telus can do both upload and download at the same speeds, simultaneously? 

"Oh, well it's so that the people who are willing to pay more for better upload speeds can spend their money on it. I don't upload much, it doesn't affect me." True, it might not. But there are NO options to upgrade the upload speed beyond around 25 megabits per second, even for most sub-corporation sized businesses. If you have so-called Fibre+ at gigabit download speeds, your upload speed is 2.5% of that and CANNOT BE UPGRADED UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. Begins to sound like a hardset limitation, doesn't it?

Well, what was coaxial used for before internet? Cable television, of course! Now, before cable television began its long, drawn out decent into death, pay-per-view and video on demand rentals were quite popular. This required the coaxial connection to send a very small signal upstream (uploading it) to Shaw to send the movie request, and Shaw would then use the much larger downstream signal to send the movie to your television. The request size is practically nothing (READ AS AROUND 2.5%) compared to the bandwidth needed to send the movie through without hiccups, so why make it any bigger?

So then the internet comes along, and all that happens is new software standards (DOCSIS) keep coming out to allow more and more information to be crammed down and up a coaxial line. But the ratio always stays roughly the same. But even with coaxial being able to push symmetrical upload and download speeds at gigabit levels, Shaw never designed its network with symmetrical speeds in mind. In the same way that companies will stick with old versions of Windows for years and years to avoid the cost of upgrading and training until it's essentially almost too late, Shaw is doing this same thing.

There, now that's out of the way we can talk about Telus. 

Telus is a corporate bulldog that will analyze your industry, launch a competing service, undercut you and then buy you for pennies on the dollar. And then when they've done this, they'll drop their standards until someone dares to try and compete with them again. Don't believe me? ADT, Price's Alarms, the LifeAlert copycat (genuinely sorry, can't find the information right now), etc. As for companies they can't just buy up, they emulate them at lower prices to undercut them and hurt their business. Companies like BetterHelp, Alarm.com, Ring, etc. None of this is illegal or anything, it's just cold-hearted. And that's what Telus seems to be at their core. Efficient, technically-perfect callousness.

Telus will give you an identical upload and download speed if you're on their fibre to the home network. They will state a price, and you will pay it. If you have a problem, it is up to you to call them and let them know. If you do, they'll address the problem either over the phone or with a technician. They don't care that something happened, they don't care if you leave. They'll fix it and get you to shut up. Telus doesn't want to be reliable because they strive for excellence, it's so they can continue to lessen their customer service staff and costs.

Shaw cares if you leave, and is happy to see you join them. Their top brass seems to be slow on the upkeep and their marketing department is a bunch of blatant liars by omission, but once they have a fibre to the home network I'd honestly say go with them any day of the week. They simply put do actually care more about maintaining good customer service.

Telus wants you to have a completely as-expected internet experience with them, for better or for worse. Exactly what you pay for, exactly what you get. You're not a person, you're an account number. If that account number reports issues, they will be resolved ASAP so Telus can forget about that account number again as quickly as possible. It's heartless, but if you squint real hard it almost feels like they're doing it because they care.

I don't care about an ISP with a heart of gold. I want reliable internet (and yes, there are obviously outlier situations where people get terrible techs or there are insulation issues in the walls of their homes, etc.) at fast speeds in either direction (as I do require decent upload speed) for a good price. 

Shaw Gigabit: 100% Down | 2.5% Up - $125 OOC (out of contract)
Telus Gigabit: 100% Down | 100% Up - $155 OOC (out of contract)

Shaw Gigabit: 100% Down | 2.5% Up - $115 TYC (two year contract)
Telus Gigabit: 100% Down | 100% Up - $99 TYC (two year contract)

Who cares if Telus costs more out of contract? After the two years, which you get the promotional price for the whole time, you're free to sign another one if you want. Or, who knows, maybe Shaw will have gotten its act together by then and you can switch! I'm not a lobbyist for Telus, if Shaw is better then go for them.

And finally, it's not a "better deal" if the TOTAL bandwidth Shaw offers with their "gigabit" internet is roughly half of what Telus offers. That's not a deal, that's dishonest marketing.

[rstra]

Shaw will increase the upstream bandwidth as they complete the return band upgrade, some neighborhoods are now 100 up. Any cable or fibre to the home will eventually be obsolete in favor of 5G.

[mdk]

@JuuliusWheezer -- Whole apartment buildings have to be retrofitted.

Shaw could run fiber-optic cable into the apartment building's "wiring-closet", and not touch any of the coaxial cables going to each unit. Say, 3 hours per apartment block.

P.S. I have never seen (pun intended) a fiber optic cable that had just one strand of glass at its core. Need more bandwidth? If so, use more of the strands.

Note that CANARIE (in Canada) and Internet 3 (in the USA) use the "dark fiber" strands that the telephone-company has deployed in their fibre-optic cable, to have ultra-fast "research" networks, because the Telcos only need a few strands.

@rstra is correct. Shaw is rolling-out 100 Mbit/second "upload" speeds to their Residential customers.

P.S. Shaw Business Internet offers 1 Gigabit/second download and 125 Mbit/second upload. That is 12.5%, not the 2.5% you claim is the upper limit.

[JuuliusWheezer]

You are absolutely correct regarding the Business Internet, that is my mistake. However, "rolling out" support for 100 megabit upload speeds is not the same as actively having it. If they already have the network and technology required, why can't it be a simultaneous upgrade? Seems software-dependent, since they've been giving out routers and modems with the capability to handle these speeds for at least 3 years. So either their network cannot currently physically support faster uploads for everyone due to its outdated technology and setup, or they are purposefully limiting the upload speeds they offer their customers to 12.5% of what they would have as a download speed on Fibre+ Gigabit. Why is this limit there, hmm? Is it due to greed or falling behind? It's okay if they made a mistake and didn't manage to predict the future, which is COMPLETELY fair, but they need to be honest about the limitations of their network and instead showcase its strengths.

If their network can't handle as fast upload speeds, they can still advertise that it's available in far more areas than Telus PureFibre. Shaw can give fast internet to MORE people. But, in the places where PureFibre is available, there is "some sort" of reason as to why they can't seem to deliver more than 12.5% of a gigabit upload speed. Aaaand, that's once it's supposedly rolled out to everyone. So we're supposed to pretend that once they reach 125 megabits, that it's a comparable speed? Of course not. If the prices are the same (or in this case, cheaper with Telus) and I am physically being given more bandwidth to upload on, with everything else being at least as good, there is no practical reason for me to choose Shaw.

"But will you use all that extra upload speed?" Yes, yes I do. And besides, it doesn't matter. Going for the option that presents you the most value and service per dollar (so long as the value and service is at least the same) is always the right decision.

[JuuliusWheezer]

Sorry, one other thing. If they only wire fibre into the junction boxes in condo and apartment buildings, then once again you run into the bottleneck of coaxial. Have we hit the limit yet? Not yet, but again once places have the capability for far higher speeds then demand for it will come as well. Fibre, plain and simple, can carry more data through it than coaxial can, and it can carry it faster (which is also very useful for any low-latency applications, which many businesses can depend on such as financial businesses).

Oh boy. Okay, so when your specific home signal is "sent out" downstream to your home through the fibre network from Telus, it is encoded as its own individual frequency of light. This is similar to, as I said, how radio stations occupy different frequencies in the same airspace. In the same way that colours of light can be combinations of different light frequencies, this is how a fibre sends so many independent frequencies down the same lines. These fibre cables have PLENTY of individual fibres, all carrying multiple frequencies. 

However, unless if you have the decryption tools needed to "tune in" to a specific frequency, you can't read it. This means that you effectively have your own dedicated fibre route to and from the main Telus routing stations with lightspeed connectivity, and no one else's datastreams interfere with yours for near perfect signal integrity.

Shaw is mostly like this. Until the fibre ends. The propagation of electrical current down wire is approximately 90% of the speed of light traveling through the fibre medium, and gets heavily degraded by RF interference unlike a signal down an optical fibre does. While modern hardware is used to accounting for data integrity loss and can check the integrity of a file automatically between the source and destination, this back and forth verification needs to happen more often on coaxial routes. Integrity verification over coaxial occurs slower due to the speed of current in a wire, all the while taking up precious bandwidth which the coaxial already has less of than a fibre. 

So just to summarize, a fibre cable carries exponentially more bandwidth (even if that bandwidth isn't used now, demand always catches up with supply) with noticeably lower latency and potential for data loss. Once installed, the network also requires less cost to maintain due to less cost involved in maintaining signal integrity (on average, fibre cables can maintain data integrity without boosting for 500m versus coaxial only being able to do so for around 100m) and physically less energy required to transmit data through the network. Shaw is not the enemy, but if you have fibre to the home for the same price or cheaper, it is absolutely a better deal and a better technology.

PS: modern shielded fibre cables are also rated for higher durability in homes and in outdoor conditions, buried or otherwise. So YES, there are many condominium buildings and apartment buildings running fibre lines directly into each unit from the junction stations due to the inherent issues of coaxial, both as new buildings and as renovations. Several buildings from the 1910s in my area have been retrofitted for each unit. These property managers can see the writing on the wall and want to show that their assets are future-proof, why doesn't Shaw?

[mdk]

@JuuliusWheezer -- modern shielded fibre cables are also rated for higher durability in homes 

And yet, I got a cell-phone cell from a very-senior friend, who had a total loss of connectivity on her Telus Fiber Optik system -- phone/TV/Internet.

The problem was that the fiber-optic cable terminated at a Telus box under her L-shaped computer-table, and she accidentally tangled her foot into the fiber-optic cable, moved her foot, and broke the "last inch" of the cable away from the Telus box. Ouch!

That was not a "durable" connection in her home.

The Telus technician arrived later the same day, to reconnect.

[Temi]

This is so on point, I decided to comment.

Shaw has a long way to go with the quality of their internet and should work on that. If Shaw wants to compete with Telus' pricing, they should also compete with Internet speed and uptime.

In summary, if you have used Telus before, you would be frustrated by Shaw. One might choose to stay because of the cheaper pricing, but as soon as it becomes the same or even more expensive, There is simply no point staying put.