If my family and business uses did not require 24/7 support I might consider them. Their equivalent service of what I have now costs $4 per month less than I pay Teksavvy.

But to me the support is indeed everything.

Outages that a modem reboot won't fix are infrequent but they do happen. And if they do and I'm down at 2am I can call Teksavvy, on the other end is someone who knows both my service and my modem.

Cable and DSL (and I might assume fiber) modems for consumers are pretty stupid devices with at most a few idiot lights to tell you the device's state. (My current cable modem has but a single idiot light but it can pulse and change colour.) This is not something I can easily diagnose myself, YMMV.

The Freenet approach to modem acquisition does not give me confidence that calling for support  at 2am will reach a first-line tech who is immediately capable of running remote diagnostics on my hardware. Teksavvy can because they supply (free of charge, not rented separately) my modem, and are intimately familiar with its make and model. When I upgraded my service a few years ago they swapped out my modem with another model able to handle the higher speed.

Last year I ran into a problem that was the result of a modem gone flaky. The Teksavvy support tech was able to determine this remotely and immediately(*) dispatched a replacement. How far would such an issue get resolved by Freenet? BYOD and one-off device sales work for low-tier mobile providers like Public Mobile, and it may work for people with the time to research what works, but I have had my butt saved on multiple occasions by Techsavvy support that knows the entirety of my Internet connection. I don't think this level of service is matched anywhere, let alone by a nonprofit that relies on community support.

If I'm wrong about Freenet support I encourage being corrected by someone who knows better.

- Evan

(*) The one Achilles heel of Teksavvy is that they are located in Chatham and don't have a GTA presence. If your modem is dead they have to send it (they pay round trip) by courier. and they only ship hardware Monday to Friday. What this means is that, even using overnight courier, if the modem dies on Friday afternoon you won't get the replacement until Tuesday which means potentially four days down, worst case. This happened to me once but they credited me for the days down and IMO that's STILL a better option than needing to go emergency shopping for a new cable or dsl or fiber modem and having to guess at compatibility.