Canadian High Speed Internet (Slowly) Trickles Out
- Marketing Strategies Highlight Duopoly
In announcements just a day or so apart, Rogers and Bell/Aliant are starting to offer up real high speed internet for Canadian consumers in limited areas.
Rogers is bringing 50Mbps DOCSIS cable access to Toronto residents, for the price of $150/month. Besides the 150Mbps, you’ll also be looking at a data cap of 150GB per month, which is pretty anemic for the price. If you do the math, you could blow through your 150GB cap in about an hour 10 hours if you’re going full (non)throttle.
In comparison, Bell/Aliant is bringing FibreOp (sounds like a cool video game name to me) to the cities of Fredericton and Saint John in New Brunswick. There’s no word on speed, but in the US, Verizon’s similar FiOS delivers 20Mbps. This will be the first city wide rollout of fibre optic to the home (FTTH) in Canada. In the past, such high speed access to residents has been largely limited to developments such as CityPlace in Toronto. As of this writing, there’s no information on pricing or data caps end users would be facing when using FibreOp.
If I were less pessimistic, both announcements could be seen as a sign of Canada finally digging its way out of the bandwidth hole that the “red couch/blue couch duopoly” has created, but if Rogers pricing scheme (and I use that in the strictest of meanings), it’ll be a while yet before it becomes reasonable.
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