Publicly Funded Broadband and 802.11

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Sunday February 24, 2002 @09:51PM from the wave-of-the-future dept.

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.

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Re:That is one seriously smart move by tonywong · 2002-02-24 22:54 · Score: 5, Informative

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.