TL:DR; a mixed bag
Was sold and purchased 25 Mbps down, 3 Mbps up. Initial speed tests were not good. Extremely variable; often times no faster than 4 Mbps down, and less than 1 Mbps up. I noticed that I seemed to max out at 15 Mbps down and 2 Mbps up. WaveDirect have a package that matches this service profile. I thought that was too coincidental. I inquired, and sure enough, I was on their 15/2 service and was told this was the maximum they could provide at my location.
I work from home, and like many others these days, I spend a majority of my time on Zoom and Teams calls. Upstream is important. I complained, and they modified my profile to provide up to 3 Mbps up as a compromise. They couldn't provide more on the downstream.
During regular casual use (YouTube, web surfing, etc...), it was *okay*, not great. Very inconsistent. Wildly variable ping times. Sometimes I could cloud game on it (Google Stadia), but usually, it was too pixelated and laggy to be able to. Whenever it rained heavily, service would be knocked out. In the mornings and evenings speeds were *very* slow; 1-2 Mbps down at times, less than 1 Mbps up. When I was able to start using the connection for work, it was again, choppy and inconsistent. Most of the time it would be fine (but not fast), often times borderline unusable (choppy audio, freezing video).
Once my 1 month trial was up, I asked if they could extend it by a week because I hadn't had much time living with it for work purposes. I was told no. Reluctantly, I decided to sign a one year contract for $99 rather than pay the $199 no-contract fee. Contract terms were also confusing; I was told this, first:
An immediate cancellation-2 Year/Full penalty when committed is $450
(Under a Year/If paid within 2 weeks can be reduced)
** Complete Under One Year = Cancellation Fee of $200
** Complete One Year = $50
I found this slightly confusing, so I asked for clarification when agreeing to continue service. I was then told they had changed things to $15/month for each remaining month in your contract. That was a factor in choosing to sign for one year.
The next 6 weeks weren't great. My router (eero) runs a speed test almost daily, so I had a running log of performance. 5/2 was the average. There would be good days where it hit 14/3 or 10/2, but there were far more days of 4/1 or even 3/1. Steaming video services would buffer frequently. I reduced quality settings in every streaming app that I could. Storms are frequent in this area of Canada, and we would have outages that would often last 5-10 minutes.
I decided to call WaveDirect to cancel. I asked if any accommodation could be made on the cancellation fee, as it just wasn't working out, and I had expressed concerns before. I was told it would be $450, which contradicted what I was told when I signed up. Then I was offered the $15/month for the remaining contract term (11 months). They informed me that because I hadn't called to complain about service outages, they couldn't compromise on the fee. Frankly, I would have been calling them almost daily. When I did have to call technical support to authorize my personal router (twice), no one ever answered the phone. I had to leave a message and they would eventually call me back. I never received any response to my text messages either; a newer option they advertise on their recently revamped website.
WaveDirect was a mixed bag of mostly average, somewhat acceptable service, with frequent service disruptions, inconsistent communication and somewhat misleading business practices. I feel like they did their best as far as the actual *service* goes, given technology constraints, but they could improve the other areas of their business a little bit, too.
I would only recommend them if you're okay with the above, or if you literally have no other option.
If you're a casual user who isn't relying on the internet for virtually everything (work, entertainment, etc...), they may suit you just fine. read more
