I used to work for Shaw a year or so ago, and have personally had Shaw High Speed Internet since around 1996. I've had their service in 4 separate locations around Calgary, and have had very few issues with it. For the most part they are pretty good about upgrading their equipment if the usage starts getting too high, but you do find some areas that are a bit worse for service distruptions than others. I'd say 90% of the time that I spoke with someone having issues with their connection, it ended up being their own computer (problem with nic, spyware, drivers, etc.)
As for bandwidth, I've only ever had one call from them for using too much, and this was a few years ago when they had a lower "allowed usage" amount. Unless they've changed their policy, I'm fairly sure that they only contact, and turn off the top X (where X may be 20-50 or something like that) "abusers" in each area of the city. So if you're doing 40-70gb in a month, you're probably ok... but 170gb is obviously going to get a call.
This is from their site:
"The guidelines for Bandwidth Usage/month for each service package are the following: Shaw High-Speed (with Xtreme-I) - 50 GigaByte; SOHO - 50 GigaByte; Professional - 70 GigaByte; Business - 100 GigaByte (combined download and upload)"
I'm assuming that Shaw High-Speed regular (without Xtreme-I) is the same as Xtreme-I, but I'm not too sure. It used to be 1GB up and 5GB down. If you're curious, I'm sure you could easily find out by giving them a call.
As for the whole Telus vs Shaw thing ... I'd say that if you have a really horrible Shaw connection, you'ved talked to their support, have had service calls and its not getting any better, then give Telus a shot. Hopefully you can deal with their crappy customer service .. I know I couldn't when I tried them. The quality of internet connection at the best of times is probably pretty close though, between the two.
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