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Publicly Funded Broadband and 802.11
bflame writes: "The Canadian province of Alberta is building the infrastructure to provide highspeed internet service to 422 cities. The government of Alberta along with Cisco Networks, Microsoft and Axia will be installing highspeed fiber optic lines to link 422 cities. The contracts also required competition among ISPs to insure lower internet costs. Cisco provides a nice
write up in IQ magazine. Globe Technologies is
reporting that work has started on the Alberta Supernet. The government of Alberta has an article about the supernet along with this article." We've mentioned Alberta earlier - nice to see they're moving ahead with the project. And an anonymous reader sent in a link about the city of Tallahasee rolling out a public WLAN.
In the west there's Shaw Cable with speeds around 4000/350 or Telus DSL at 1500/256. In the east there's Bell Sympatico 1000/128, Rogers Cable 2000/128 and Videotron 3000/128. Plus there's also the various resellers that are basically rebranded from the bigger companies. The above all cost about $40-$50 CAN. Some companies are also introducing a "lite" product which offers 128/128 speeds for $25 CAN a month which is great for people that have little use for the internet but hate keeping the phone line busy. Even if you can't get DSL or Cable there is a satellite service which will allow you to download at better speeds than dialup.
This will bring more jobs and more broadband, hopefully the other provinces will follow.
If you thought you liked it because of these articles...you should see the prices we pay. You should pack your bags and come on over.
There are two major providers of broadband here in Edmonton (one of two major cities in Alberta). Cable modem (www.shaw.ca) is $40 per month, and DSL is $50 per month (www.telusplanet.com).
What's so special about that? If you factor in the prices I mentioned are in Canadian dollars (about 63 cents US), you'll realize that Albertans pay just a little more than dial-up users in the US.
Even better is that my provider (Shaw) doesn't care how many machines I've got hooked up to my cable modem. I've got 10 different machines here without needing NAT or DHCP servers of my own.
We call it CommunityNet here in Saskatchewan, and the project is over a year old. It's mandated by the Federal Government, Supernet just happens to be the name for the 'Alberta' part of the project. The mention of Microsoft or any other software provider is meaningless. Each hospital, school, government site runs whatever software they want, and here, serveral of them are running Linux, Mac or Solaris. Some of the schools also have the Sun One? connected to the network.
It's a nice project, and a huge cash cow for the big ISPs and hardware providers, but there is still room for the little guy to get a peice of the action
.
-- I care not for your foolish signatures.
You have to hand it to Intrigna. They beat out Alberta's own telco (Telus) to get this contract, which to me is quite a feat. Intrigna jointly owned by BCE and Manitoba Telecom Services. MTS (majority holder) currently has a bunch of communities (from large to extremely small) in it's own province wired for dsl, part of its own 300 million dollar initiative to wire the province for highspeed internet.
:)
Wondering how much we pay for dsl? Try 19.95 for the first 6 months (~1.2Mbps down, 256kbps up) then the price is 39.95 each month after that. Free install and startup kit included, of course. How about them apples.
The use of the word "cities" is a little strong in the article... I'd imagine some of the communities have less than 100 people.
Hello, I Work for Morrison Hershfield Ltd. We have been contracted out by Axia to handle much of the Construction managment, site aquisition and logistics of this job. Alberta is being divided up into Geographic regions each with several locations for sites in them (I belive there are 50-100 or so). I'm not sure as to the details of yet (The job has just begun rolling down here), but each of these regions is divided up into several sites which need to be setup. Perhaps the document is off with the 422 towns. I belive it would be more accurate to say 422 locations or nodes for service.