Note: Since writing this review, there have been a number of changes to this service by Telus. First, they renamed the product to “Optik TV”, and they also switched from the Minerva platform that they were using on their equipment, to equipment using Microsoft’s Media Room. Under the hood their have also been a number of changes to the service, including a 15Mbps ADSL2+/VDSL service only available with Optik TV to presumably address the slow Internet issues that manifested when Telus TV was in use.
This review relates to the original Telus TV Offering, and not the re-branded Optik TV offering with the Microsoft Media Room powered equipment. I will write a new review on Optik TV as soon as Telus install the new service for me.
A friend of mine recently had Telus TV installed, and after having a good look at her setup, I realized that Telus’ IPTV service may have finally come of age!
For those of you, who like me have been very skeptical about the effectiveness of an IPTV system based on Telus’ ADSL network, I can say that I was very pleasantly surprised by the responsiveness and clarity of her TV service. Since Shaw end up being rather pricey, with their 3 tier pricing – for the channels that I actually like to watch, and I noticed that Telus TV seemed to have a more flexible approach to channel selection, I started to investigate further. Unfortunately, I had a hard time finding really good reviews of people’s experience with the product, so after deciding that the almost $50 I would potentially save with Telus TV over my current Shaw Cable and Internet Bundle, the saving based mainly on the more flexible pricing model of their TV service, and the fact that for a 1 year contract Telus would throw in an HD capable Scientific Atlanta IPTV Set Top Box, definitely made the taking the risk on the product worthwhile.
So, I placed a phone call to Shaw to cancel my service, and I was quite surprised that they actually tried to retain me by offering me lower pricing and trial period on some of their services – but that is besides the point.
Telus require you to have either a land line (from them) or an ADSL internet service in order to get Telus TV. This is because their offering is an IPTV solution, and it requires an IP service as the signal carrier. In theory, this is a good thing as IPTV is per definition all digital, unlike the bunch of channels you still get from Shaw that are analog.
I did find the Telus call center staff are clearly not well-trained, as the first time I called, and the operator asked if I had a home phone, I said, not with Telus, and I made the mistake of telling her that I currently use Vonage for my home phone. She immediately countered saying that in that case I would not be able to have Telus TV as it is “incompatible” with Vonage. After some arguing with her, and pointing out that their website said I just need Internet service from Telus, she called her supervisor, who promptly told me the same thing. I hung up, and called back into the queue, this time keeping my mouth shut about Vonage.
My order was taken, and an installation scheduled about two weeks later. Before the installation I received an automated call reminding me of the appointment and also mentioning that the installation could take up to 2 hours. Fair enough I though, as I assumed that they would probably need to run some Cat-5 cable for the STB from the ADSL modem that they would install (having read this on a number of sites on the Internet).
The tech called before arriving, and was actually 15 minutes early. What a contrast to the call-center experience. He was well-trained, competent and polite, and did not mind me looking over his shoulder and geeking out over what he was installing.
Telus IPN-330 HD Terminal
Rather than run Cat-5 through my older building he installed an SMC EZ Connect HPNA 3.0 Coax to Ethernet adapter and used the existing co-ax cable provided by Shaw for the cable TV to run the ethernet to the Scientific Atlanta box. Neat and quick.
The IPN330HD is much smaller than the large Motorola STB that Shaw installed, and features a wonderful host of interface options, including HDMI out (which you only get on the Shaw PVR). Have a look at the document for the options on the back.
Once installed, it took a few minutes for the STB to download its software, the installed punched in the activation code and almost immediately the guide was active.
My initial response to flipping through the channels was impressive. In some cases it was faster than the Shaw box. I did not notice any significant delay, as Chris Chen mentions in his review of the service as a beta user, and if you are a channel flipper you should have no problems with this system.
Picture quality, on the non-HD channels I found – albeit subjectively to be a little lower than the Shaw service. I suspect this has to do with the fact that everything needs to be h264 encoded to be broadcast over the Telus IPTV multicast network, and you can notice some minor blockiness on the edge of fast-moving images – particularly images with strong contrast, like for example, the characters in the Simpsons or Family Guy. Also, I think that Telus may be using a fairly low quality compression profile, in order to support multiple set-top boxes on one ADSL service.
HD is excellent, with the device putting out 1080i over the HDMI interface and 5.1 audio. I watched a number of games of the FIFA Confederations Cup in South Africa, and there was no tearing or compression artifacts on the HD channels. Even the textures of the grass on the field looked natural, and I find this is the first place you see artifacts on HD broadcast.
In summary, after a week with the service, I am very happy for the switch, so my list of pros and cons right now:
Pros:
- Cheaper and more flexible channel options to Shaw
- Smaller more compact set-top box and quick installation
- Set-top box has a much better interface than the Shaw box
- With the SpeedTouch modem, I am able to use my own router and firewall.
Cons:
- You have to get Telus Internet, which we all know is not as good as Shaw, and to make matters worse, you don’t get much more than 3Mbps when you are watching HD content. I guess with Shaw’s service only about $40 a month, if this is really an issue you can keep their Internet though, and still save some money.
- In my setup, there is no way to get my building’s security camera onto the device… I will still investigate if this is possible.
- Subjectively poorer non HD picture.
{ 16 comments… read them below or add one }
Quick note:
I have ran this system with small DSL modem (telus gives you) and my own linksys Router for months with no problems. I put PVR in DMZ zone and it worked flawless.
So you can run this on your own setup but telus will tell inform you only works on there all-in-one modem/routers. That in fact is a lie. They use D-link or Actiontec all in one routers,
Both are Crap.. They are confusing and not very configurable. I’ve had nothing but problems with Telus all in one routers.
I have had Optik tv since um Early Nov of 2009. The menu/guild on the Cisco 430 PVR Boxes is far Superior to what shaw currently has. Tho I have not seen there boxes, I did have old older HD 6200 I think and I had nothing but problems. I could not run HDMI from shaw box to my bran new LG 42 inch HD tv. As there some kinda handshaking error and screen would blink on and off. I tried to inform shaw but they just make excuse and say was my HDMI cable. Even tho my ps3 runs fine and if I switched hdmi cable. I got same results. shaw hd box did not work on very well with HDMI.
The good:
Telus PVR box is years ahead shaw
-Fast channel change/surf
-Much better menu/guild
- anything recorded can be watch on any telus boxs
-Get more channels then what u get with shaw cable.
-Faster upload speeds then shaw.
-You can watch HD channels on normal SD tv..
-Picture quality on HD channel when on SD tv using S-video is decent.
-Works best if use CAT 5 eithernet.
-internet speed is about same I’d say.. I haven’t really notice that much of difference but i don’t do a lot downloading.
The cons:
-picture quality on SD channels is very bad
-Picture quality on HD channels is very soft/pixialed
There quality is no where near what Sat or cable gives and seems be getting worst with each month.. HD channels that have fast moving picture or water seem be very very pixailed like there using too much compression. blocky artifacts are common on SD and HD channels too.
-Sound on ALL HD and SD channels goes up and down like crazy.
-Dolby Digital is also has up/down issues at time..
The remote as has nice feel. but You have to point it right at the box. A bit of pain.
They still haven updated to version 2.0. I’v hurd rumors
that when move beond currently 1.6? ver Version 2.0 I hear is suppose be really good, but only time will tell.
This system is much better then shaw.. I was paying $160-$170 a month for most HD channel and SD channels and $20 a month to rent the crapy HD box. Not even PVR.
Currently I’m getting 2 Boxes no extra cost. but I never signed any contract nor did agree any verbal contract. But I am only paying about $130 a month.. The PVR is solid. Menu/guild fast surf channels. PVR recoding has few issues. Sometime you’ll get double shows, Sometime it don’t record properly, but has only happens few times. ALL PVRs seem have few record issues..
If you wire these via eithernet. You’ll should have no issues..
yes its bit of pain, but it is the best way to go.
If they fix the sound issues, fix the HD and SD channels so they not so badly compressed Id be happy. but for now its is better, but these minor issues are starting to annoying me.. It’s why I have 42 inch HD tv and Surrounded system. I love the PVR box as I wish I could just hook this up to shaw cable and id be happy.
Hopefully the system updates soon and gets better.
Just bear in mind that their Optik service is usually based on a VDSL2 connection. I hear you with the D-Link DSL modem and your own router concept and this is really in my opinion a much better idea than that all-in-one Actiontec modem they are putting in today, but if you are on a VDSL2 link you don’t really have much choice as the Actiontec they use is one of the only VDSL2 devices on the market. There are products from Cisco, Alcatel and Zyxel but you may have a better time finding hens teeth then getting one of these at a good price.
The service itself is good now that telus has optic TV the ability to recorded 2 show while you are watching one or recorded 3 show when you are out is outstanding and since you are able to watch TV that you recorded on any other TV that you have a box for is great. However these perks come with the price of inept installers and incompetent customer service they, Personally I have to call them every month for some reason or another. some examples of the S### service that I received in the last year that I have been with them. Initially they were suppose to give me 2 had box’s when I sighed up and the only brought one then tried to charge me extra for the second box when they delivered it a month later. Then about 3 months of being with telus I started getting charged for ppv that I had not ordered when I called they accused me of trying to get free service and said that I can be the only person to order stuff since I was the person that set up my pass code I then informed then that I had not set up a password yet and they started back tracking and said they would credit back the 120 dollars on my account the next month. Next month came charges were not reversed and I had to call again to get it credited. Another downside of Telus is that if you use Bit torrents while you are watching TV it will cause your TV to freeze they have tried to resolve this issue about 8 times with me and in the end told me to stay off the net if I want to watch TV(boy being in a 3 year contract is great) then just recently I moved so called to change my service to my new address and when they day came they showed up and took 3 weeks to get my cable and net hooked up. I talked to them about six times over those 3 weeks and in my discussions to get my TV hooked up I tried to get my cancellation fee lifted they agreed to remove it and to credit the month of service, Anyway got my bill in Nov and what do you know I was charged for the mth that I did not have service so I called to cancel and they said it would cost me 120 to cancel and basically called me a lire when I told them I was not suppose to be charged for the cancellation fee but at least they finally credited my account the month I did not have service. Today upon review of my bill I noticed that They increased what I pay for TV without giving me any notice hmmm strange I thought contracts were binding on both party’s. O I almost forgot when you call them you are on hold for at least 20 min a time and half the time that they put you on hold you get cut off.
So the moral of this little story is if you don’t value your time you can get a cool optic TV system, but if you want good service go with Shaw. Only 364 more days till I can cancel this service
….
I have one HDTV flat screen and 4 small remote cheap tvs. Do I need a box for each TV or just for the HDTV. ( Can I hookup my main tv to Telus and still get non-hd channels on my small bedroom tvs without buying a lot of hardware?
I don’t know what the new Telus hardware looks like. Since I wrote this review, Telus have introduced some significant changes to their hardware, around the time that they renamed the service to Optik I have been told, such as support for more than one TV from a single set-top-box. I have not been able to checkout this new hardware, as I am now living in an area where Telus do not have IPTV service, so all I know at this point is hearsay. Sorry not to be able to be more helpful.
You can see the Telus hardware here on the Optik Website, however, the information there is really slim.
Why should I pay for Mediaroom at $5.00 per box per month to fix software problems that shouldn’t have happened in the first place? It should be against the law to sell you something that isn’t suitable for the purpose. It’s up to Telus to fix the problem, not upsell. What is this, bait and switch?
TRAVIS:
Your list of cons looks like you must be on the old Minerva platform, on the new Microsoft MediaRoom platform almost all of these have been addressed. Having used a lot of other providers and being quite particular about my TV and HD I can say it by far beats anything out there right now. The exciting part is it is only in it’s infancy and will only get better.
@kelly: The M$ MediaRoom platform is better, and you are right IPTV is in its infancy and will continue improving, the converse is so will cable, especially now that we will slowly start to see DOCSIS-III and later Fiber to the Home (FTTTH) in Urban areas (in fact I believe that there are already trials of FTTH in Vancouver). DOCSIS-III (this is true today even for DOCSIS-II) has far greater capacity that an ADSL2+ does, thus I am afraid to say that Telus are building on far sandier soil than Shaw with their underlying media.
I am pretty sure Shaw will invest in improving their box’s interface, I wish both of the providers would spend some time in the UK and look what Sky and friends have done with their set-top box interfaces and then come back, and point their programmers in the right direction…
I guess we can tell which side of the fence both of us are on. ADSL2+ is what we are currently on and have been for quite some time, Telus has completed an extensive build out of moving their DSLAMS out into the field and now most of these have already begun migrating over to VDSL2. Speaking of FTTH I believe SHAW is way behind, for well over 5 years TELUS has been plowing composite drops to all new houses, which includes a 4 pr copper and SM fibre, and they already have trials in many communities using GPON.
I guess we will have to wait and see how quickly the transistion happens for both companies, but it is exciting either way because it pushes everyone to continue to improve their services.
Thanks all for your valued information. We recently moved here from the UK, went with Shaw on a recommendation…and found the interface to be appalling, compared to what we are used to in the UK. We thought perhaps we made the wrong choice and should have gone with Telus, however – by the comments above, it would be worse, and the key driver (the interface) would not improve.
I suppose we have to take the bad (Shaw or Telus) with the good (Rocky Mountains!)
cheers
I totally hear you about the functionality of what you guys get in the UK, I was blown away by my first experience of Sky, their remote and the interactivity that you can get (with the colored buttons on the remote), and just the functionality of the interface. I think you will find that here in Canada (and the USA) cable, satellite (and mobile phones) are generally cheaper, but have more basic functionality, whereas in the UK they have been extended to their full potential.
I don’t now which is better, however, I am always for cheaper
Oh, and welcome to Canada…
Telus has MEDIAROOM which I can say by experience destroys Shaw in all respects. Telus now has basically what Verizon Fios or AT&T have been offering in the states for years. With Mediaroom you have a triple tuner PVR, you can pause TV in one room and resume the show in another room. 1 PVR for the entire house!!! You don’t need a PVR for each TV. Very fast channel changing, MPEG4 encoding, High Speed 15.0 with TV, picture in picture browsing of TV guide while watching a show. The best thing is all the pixelating, picture freezing or blacking out, voice sync issues are gone and the price is the same as the older platform!!! I had Shaw, Bell Expressvu, and the old Telus IPTV and I can say for sure Telus Mediaroom is far superior than the all of the above!! Oh, yeah and since Mediaroom is a Microsoft engine, Telus with soon have Xbox compatibility, consumers will have the ability to create and use apps, and control the PVR from remote locations (cell compatibility). Wait, one more thing, Telus now has an awesome, Dlink wifi modem which comes with the Mediaroom upgrade, great modem people!!!
Just wondering if you’re still so positive about Telus TV? I’m not a techie, but I’ve had it since October and I hate it. If they weren’t giving it to me for free for a year, I would have switched back to Shaw immediately. I’m still hoping for them to come through with their upgrades, but my patience is running out.
Cons:
Pros:
That’s it.
@Travis: I should update my review or write a new one. I moved back to Shaw after about 4 months, as there were a whole bunch of issues I could not live with. For me, the HD unit was way too slow changing channels, I could no longer tolerate the quality of the non-HD channels, they look like really bad copied DVDs sometimes – with those blocky artifacts from the compression that Telus use to make it all work on their DSL service. I am a System Administrator by profession, and I found that the limited speed of the Internet service that you get from Telus when you have their TV service was just frustrating when working on remote machines from home. As for your comments on the interface, I actually found that the Telus TV interface, while slow, was better that the Shaw box interface. Shaw annoy me terribly by showing every single channel in their guide, including the ones I don’t get, and then when you select it, you get that annoying box telling you that you do not subscribe to this service.
The new Shaw Dual Tuner PVR is awesome, and upgradable by adding external terabyte hard-drives to it, also, if you just want basic HD service on top of your basic analog cable on Shaw, it is a mere $2.99 extra if you already own the HD terminal, so the cost advantage with Telus has been largely eliminated by Shaw (although they are still nowhere near as flexible in their channel slections as Telus).
You really know your stuff. We had Telus TV for two weeks, and my wife could not stand the poor quality and pixellation on our Sony Bravia 46 and on a Samsung 46 HD. Quality of picture was far worse than Shaw. We are now back to Shaw for TV and Telus for internet. However, I don’t want to run another CAT 5 from my office to the BluRay and the TV which have Ethernet connections. I wanted to use the SMC coax to Ethernet adapter; I had one going into the wall (in my home office), and bought a second EZ connect to convert back from coax to Ethernet at the TV and BluRay to get BD and system updates for TV and BluRay. The first EZ connect is linked to my 2 Wire router, and from then through coax to the second EZ connect, then to the BluRay, but I can’t get an internet connection at the other end. I also can’t find a helpful diagram online. Can you advise please?
Cheers
Patrick
I guess you have done all the obvious checks first i.e., made sure that both the Ethernet as well as the HCNA link lights on the two EZ Connects are lit? If this is not the case, then the HCNA network between the two EZ Connects is not correctly setup. If this is the case, make sure that you are running the co-ax between the two EZ Connects from the correct ports (they have two, one for TV and one for HCNA – and they are labeled as such , the co-ax between the devices should be between the two HCNA ports, and the Shaw feed goes into the TV port on the one and to your PVR from the TV port on the other one). Other things to check, is make sure that you have a single piece of co-ax between the two EZ Connects (splitters may cause trouble, as each split effectively halves the signal strength).
If you have two green lights on both EZ Connects, log into the web interface of your 2-Wire, and have a look see if you can see the BluRay player in the network list. To logon to the web interface go to (http://192.168.1.254) from a browser on a computer that does have Internet connectivity. There you can see if you need to specifically enable Internet access for the BluRay.
Hope this helps a tad – a little difficult to help without knowing exactly how you have these connected. Also I am assuming you have this EZ Connect (SMCHCNA2-ETH)