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Canada's Internet Among Best, Report Says
silentbrad writes "Canadians enjoy among the fastest, most widely available and least expensive broadband Internet in the developed world, says a report released Thursday. The report, based on the results of 52 million speed tests of broadband users across the G7 countries and Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) membership, was produced by Montreal-based consulting firm Lemay Yates Associates Inc. on behalf of Rogers Communications Inc., the country's largest broadband service provider. It disputes the OECD's own report, published in July, that ranked Canada's high-speed Internet offerings significantly below those of other countries. The report comes days after the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission revealed a sharp jump in the number of complaints it has received regarding Internet traffic-management practices, or 'throttling' in recent months."
And it's about to get a little better — reader ForgedArtificer points out that Rogers has promised to end all throttling over their network by the end of the year.
Canada's Internet access is among the best. They do not have their own internet.
I Got 25 Mbps & 200G llimits for almost nothing, and you can add lots of 120G for 40$
The report, based on the results of 52 million speed tests of broadband users across the G7 countries and Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) membership, was produced by Montreal-based consulting firm Lemay Yates Associates Inc. on behalf of Rogers Communications Inc.
I think that alone says how big a grain of salt to take this report with.
I live in Canada and we have unusually slow and expensive Internet connections compared to other developed countries, especially places in Europe and the more liberal parts of east Asia. A lot of that is due to the remoteness of much of Canada. In the cities it's not so bad, but step outside the city limits and the speed drops off in a hurry. Many places in rural Canada don't have high-speed yet, at least not without a a very expensive satellite connection.
The highest speed connection I can find in my corner of the country is about 1/200th the speed of my friend's standard connection in Korea. And close to the same price.
For video streaming users, it sucks. You need to carefully manage your usage because of bandwidth cap. If you use more than 9GB/month, your internet account might be blocked.
Sure... I will believe Rogers when I actually see the speed improvement in my own home. I will admit that their service has improved over the years. No throttling. I'm sure they will just change the name of the function to something else.
Best Internet?? Ohh that must be why my parents are forced to pay $59 a month for 512kbps as their only non-dialup option! $99 for 1mbit. Also a download usage cap of 24MB/hr... Don't believe me? netkaster.ca/packages.htm
Would have had 1st post, but Rogers is throttling me...
The big two (Bell and Rogers) just successfully lobbied to FORCE OUR OTHER COMPANIES to stop offering unlimited home internet.
:(
Prices just went up from $24.95 a month for reasonable service (had problems with the Acanac $19.95 sorry) to $29 and that's only available paid in advance for a year (Still WAY WAY better the 3 year contracts they were handing out 5 years ago, but still...)
So our internet is now more expensive by 1/6 not sure how much that factors in but you can get a T1 anywhere so it must play a role.
Also they're rolling out wireless net, 802.11i/s equivalent... which increases penetration but hurts reliability and latency... which means no gaming + slow page refreshes + fewer home servers.
So depending on when the study was conducted they could be way off... Canadians generally are reasonably well off, educated and meticulous (fallout from the "Friendly Polite" thing) so we took to computing pretty well... doesn't mean the companies providing it are worth a damn.
I still remember receiving a file from a girlfriend living in Korea. Holy tube inferiority batman! She saturated my downlink then wrote me asking if something was broken
...the Nordic countries have no such thing as traffic allowances on broadband connections (in fact, they never did, not even 12 years ago when ADSL popped up), and their speeds as well as monthly fees are notably better than what Canadian ISPs offer.
Hey, kids, create whichever study results you want simply by changing your methodologies!
As a Canadian living in California.
Cable here:
Comcast: I pull a lot of data at like 2MB/s consistently fast
Rogers: I pull like 1-1.2 MB/s & within like 10 days, I get a warning that I'm almost done with my cap.
Comcast: 49.95/mo
Rogers: 39.95 + overage charges which cap out at $20 extra (the overage charges are insane - basically guaranteed to get to $20).
Bell is an even bigger joke. I think I'm going to trust the OECD results than the results of a firm hired by Rogers.
I beg to differ.
Typical entry-level plan in Canda:
http://www.videotron.com/service/internet-services/internet-access/basic-internet
Cost: 29.95 CAD/month (29.97 USD/month)
Speed: 3 Mbps down, 800 Kbps up.
Cap: 5 gigabytes per month combined download+upload cap.
Best available plan in Estonia:
http://www.eq.ee/page.asp?p=45
Cost: 17,19 euros/month (22.60 USD/month)
Speed: From 16 to 64 Mbps down, 8 Mbps up.
Cap: None.
It's been said but, we're not exactly at the forefront of interweb techmonomolology unless you narrow the scope to equally um monopoly-based infrastructure.
crazy dynamite monkey
I can tell you with absolute conviction that WE DO NOT have even close to the best access or speed.
Huge swaths of the country are not able to access anything other then cell phone internet and most of the country is only able to get online using either Rogers or Bell (as they simply do not allow the little guys to use there lines outside of the big cities) and the price is huge (I pay $50 for 5GB max per month with over the limit prices that cost ~ $800 if you use 30Gigs).
Also absolutely everything is heavily throttled.
And Rogers only promised because they where threatened by the government.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Rogers pays for a study that says Rogers is one of the best providers in the world.
In other news, my wife declared that I was one the best lovers she ever had.
Does anyone have a link to this report? It would be interesting to see the rankings for the UK and also their methodology.
I'd like to know how they define broadband. Is it >2Mbit/s or >10Mbit/s? What data limits are they comparing? When they compare pricing does that include phone lines if they are a mandatory pre-requisite to broadband access?
I m st congr tula e R gers on t eir contin ed dedica ion to excelle t s rvice. I H pe to see mor advance ents in th futur as weR@#%^[NO CARRIER]
Good people go to bed earlier.
This study was bought and paid for by Rogers. It is complete and utter bullshit!
I have good, fast, uncapped and relatively affordable cable internet access. I get it from TekSavvy, a smaller "indie" ISP that leases the last mile from the incumbents but uses their own network after that point. On cable, this gets me around Rogers' throttling and filtering. DSL users aren't so lucky as Bell's throttling happens right at the client node.
When I was still with Rogers, my monthly bill for the mid-range service tier was $130. This consisted of $64.99 for the service itself, $50 in overage charges every month, and taxes. With Tek, I'm paying $62 for faster service and no caps.
Our internet is far from the best. Bell, Rogers and Telus are classic telco robber barons. They oversell like mad, throttle and cap in such a way as to protect their old phone and TV services, and spend fortunes on advertising to fool us into believing we're not actually getting fucked. If they took half the advertising budget, and spent it on infrastructure upgrades, we'd be the envy of every other crooked G7 nation. With the low-cost, no-nonsense indies it's a lot better, but the grand majority of users are still with the big three due to misplaced loyalty and laziness.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
can we tag this as bullshit?
Rogers Communications is infamous here for throttling p2p traffic, and personally took my connection down to 5kbps over all protocols while using p2p technologies.
Honestly slashdot, what happened to the editorial quality of years past?
fork anyone?
I think this article is trolling us in canada, best internet rofl, we still dont even have something remotely close to fios, bell and rogers just raised their prices for third party isps, the infrastructure sucks so i got no idea what this report is talking about.
Is 15 of 32 "among world's fastest"? RT @gregobr: Canadian Internet speeds among world’s fastest: report http://natpo.st/yARz0G
It is normal to have cheap high speed internet access in other countries as well? IMO, comparison between cities should be separate from comparison between rural areas.
Rogers and Bell are parasites of the worst order. I can't even bother to look at the report or links. I know what I get for speed, reliability and I know what my bill is. This report can only be complete bullshit in every way!
As a Canadian, let me respond as soon as I finish being angry at the editor...
Seriously, why post the results of an oligarchical industry funded story as if fact? Seriously, what the hell, editors?
Let me put how offensive and misleading this is in perspective by changing the quote a tad:
"Americans enjoy among the fastest, most widely available and least expensive broadband Internet in the developed world, says a report released Thursday. The report, based on the results of 52 million speed tests of broadband users across the G7 countries and Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) membership, was produced by NY-based consulting firm SomeGuy Associates Inc. on behalf of AT&T Communications Inc., the country's largest broadband service provider. It disputes the OECD's own report, published in July, that ranked Canada's high-speed Internet offerings significantly below those of other countries. The report comes days after the FCC revealed a sharp jump in the number of complaints it has received regarding Internet traffic-management practices, or 'throttling' in recent months."
By helping spread this FUD you are literally doing harm to us. Due diligence, do you speak it?
I've been visiting this site for a long time. I've not liked some of the things and mistakes I've seen posted here, but this is actually making me angry. Congratulations.
I imagine this could be news of a local Canadian newspaper but Slashdot... Why?? I am from the Netherlands and live in Switzerland, both of which are "among" the best in terms of internet by some arguable measure, like Canada. The only newsworthy fact would perhaps be some nice ranked list but the article refers only to some Excel sheets, which place Canada far from number one. Better info can be found on Wikipedia.
I live in Toronto and pay $50 per month for internet with a 20 GB bandwidth cap and a maximum speed of 2.4 megabytes per second. I'd try to improve this situation except I'd rather spend a weekend at the dentist than experience the labyrinth of incompetence that is Bell's phone support.
If that ranks among the best internet provision in the developed world, then either the developed world now includes Antarctica or this study is garbage.
The beauty is though in Canada most of the population is in big cities. About half of our population lives in the top 10 cities. Heck nearly a third of the country lives in the bottom half of Ontario.
The bottom half of Ontario, to clarify, is not a city--there are just a few cities there. It is mostly rural--small towns, family farms, or commuter rural. (By commuter rural, I mean not really suburban, but nevertheless commuter). But quite a few of them have DSL.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
Common slashdot.... this news is complete nonsense.... check real prices here :
http://www.videotron.com/service/internet-services/internet-access/high-speed-internet
56$ per month for a very standard 8mpbs (without bundle) and 50gb cap. Add taxes and you're at 65$ per month
You can get way better than that in the US
Better government ... yea I could handle the winters
Better healthcare
and now better internet
Roger's has the worst customer relations of any firm ever. Take Monopoly power, add some arrogance, take away any hint of customer service and you've got Rogers Cable.
In Tokyo you can get fiber pulled right into your house.
I pay Rogers $100 CAD a month for their highest tier with a 250 gig data cap per month and "up to" 50 Mbps download speed (which I never get anywhere near...I'm lucky if I approach 8 Mbps).
I live in Calgary Alberta and I have a 100/5 connection which I think is pretty good at least compared to some values I've heard from friends that live in the US.
To be sure... I also pay $85 a month for the privilege.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
A study by canuckistan separatists says they are the best. Yes, a Country the size of the US with 3 cities and 30 million people. Somehow, just from the statistical skew of stupid, makes me think they're completely full of sh|t.
We're talking about a type of traffic that isn't usually throttled, doesn't require sustained performance for more than 10 seconds, and can be artificially inflated by ISPs to deceive their customers.
To Lemay Yates, who I strongly suspect is a shill that doesn't mind quoting the most favourable statistics to give an overall misleading impression (if not outright manufacturing them with flawed experiments), I ask how Rogers specifically fares in terms of:
-Average cost per monthly quota ($ per GB)?
-Average cost per upload speed ($ per Mbps)?
-Variation in ping and u/l, d/l speed during peak hours?
-How often multi-player video games are throttled?
-Performance beyond the local servers but still within Canada?
Is that they are the second most common visitor to http://www.earthsquotes.com and we are happy to have them using their fast internet on our quote site which is the best on the web!
...I have 40/2 cable access at home with a 250GB cap and no throttling that I've ever noticed for $46 a month (bundled with home phone and TV). If I dropped my plan down to 20/1 I would have uncapped access. There's also a 100/5 option with the same 250GB cap as the 40/2 option, but that plan is $156 per month. My location? Rural Newfoundland, in a town of about 450 people, an hour drive from the largest city in my province (which itself only has 100,000 people). High speed internet access like this is common in my province, available to most communities far more remote and even less populous than mine.
I'm not saying that it doesn't suck for Canadians, I'm just saying it doesn't suck for all of us.
Looking on the Rogers website today, their packages *start* at 35.99/mth, before modem rental from the looks of it, yet they claim that the average consumer is paying $30.79 (USD, but the exchange rate has been neck in neck lately). Their lite package gives you a whopping 15gb cap. They do have a 5-15% discount on bundling services, but Basic cable doesn't count.
http://www.rogers.com/web/Rogers.portal?_nfpb=true&_windowLabel=HiSpeedBrowse_1_2&HiSpeedBrowse_1_2_actionOverride=%2Fportlets%2Fconsumer%2Finternet%2Fbrowse%2FhiSpeedCableBrowse%2Fcompare&HiSpeedBrowse_1_2productID=WAVE&_pageLabel=INTER_HISPEED
On Bell, the major competitor, I do see prices sub $30 (including some sub $20), for "the first 12 months" and bundled with other services.
Interesting. According to the statistics at http://www.netindex.com/, the US leads Canada by two places. Being slightly faster on average, cheaper by download speed, and more reliable.
Hey Rogers, pay me enough and I will tell Canadians you have the fastest broadband in the world...
The truth is that based on 1,869,074 actual user initiated speed tests on speedtest.net , Canada currently ranks 34th in the world for household download speed and 21st versus OECD countries. See for yourself:
http://www.netindex.com/download/allcountries/
http://www.netindex.com/download/1,8/OECD/
Oh and when it comes to cost, Canada ranks 17th in the OECD: http://www.netindex.com/value/1,8/OECD/
and 19th in the world: http://www.netindex.com/value/allcountries/
These numbers don't lie!
Put Xplornet on the list of overused and under capacity services.
The report... was produced by Montreal-based consulting firm Lemay Yates Associates Inc. on behalf of Rogers Communications Inc.
I think that alone says how big a grain of salt to take this report with.
I think it should be taken as yet more horseshit advertising from one of the most despised monopolist (cable tv)/duopolist (internet, cell phone) corporations the country, whose government enabler, (deceptively called a regulator) contains a significant contingent of its "ex"-executives.
Why is corporate propaganda now being posted at Slashdot as news?
10 years ago we had faster speed and cheaper
NOW we get capped to 60 gbs on avg
versus old days of unlimited
and pay for overages that are 1000 times the cost to the carrier.
WHAT A FUCKING JOKE THIS SITE is becoming with the posts of late.
bell canada has breached 10 contracts with me one of which almost cost me my life when i tried to call 9/11 after being brutally mugged and almost bled to death ( ITS ILLEGAL WHAT THEY DID ).
i will add my story isnt rare and rogers is no better and cogeco is the most expensive isp in north america
i dont know who the heck says this but sits the biggest load a horse crap i have ever EVER EVER SEEN on slashdot.
good riddence this site dies with garbage like this.
fuck the site and the people letting this garbage being posted.
We get 50M for about $30usd a month, and 100M residential lines aren't uncommon. Get over yourself, Canada. Taiwan is just one entry in a very long list of people with better internet access.
Why is this even posted here, on Slashdot? This is such a fucking load of bullshit, paid for by Rogers. What a sad state that morons will actually believe any bullshit written by a company that was paid by the interested party to write it. Canadians may be able to access the Internet pretty much anywhere in the country, but that doesn't change that the cost to access is still stuck at the rates Canada had back in 1999. Throttling, retarded caps, insanely high prices, pitiful amount of speed allowance. Shit like this getting posted is what makes Slashdot a giant piece of shit most of the time.
A comparison between the G7 countries doesn't make much sense in the context of a previous global survey.
There are plenty of countries outside the G7 that offers better internet services. All of Scandinavia, for example.
I don't understand how this is the best. I have an 100mb connection, no download cap, my usual download speed is between 3-6 mb/s and there is no throttling. Also all I pay is 15$ for it. Also, this is not the best option out of all there are. Romania FTW.
what a fucking joke.
Even in a major Canadian city the speed is terrible.
I went from 3/1 in the downtown sector of a top 5 Canadian city because some wire didn't run the right way on that block to 100/80 everywhere in south Korea.
I pay less than I do there, if I want service, a guy comes out when I want him to, he calls before he comes and if for some reason I can't make the time, he'll ask me when he wants me to drop by.
There is no cap
no throttling (other than the underseas cable)
Rogers only hope is that Canadians never take the time to genuinely educate themselves.
Why is Slashdot posting corporate propaganda? I half expect to see an article tomorrow about how cigarettes are actually healthy.
Switched from expensive DSL reseller who had good service and I liked it,
Could not afford it, or the penalties for late fees... I will keep my eye on
DSL resale in the future.
Switched to Rogers, here's the breakdown:
Csolve (dsl reseller)
-5Mbit No cap
-65 / mo (serious late penalties)
-Lower throughput during peak hours, would drop to 3mbps
(net neutral, all sources suffered lower speeds during peak)
-Superb ping at all times even during peak.
-Payment terms / Penalties: Far to onerous for someone who might fail to make
payments on time.
Rogers
-24Mbit 100Gb Cap (UL + DL = total cap, not just DL)
-Contract: ~45 / Mo Avg over a year (1/2 of 60 * 6) + (60 * 6)
-During peak hours does not connect to some sites, but others still connect fast
(because they are not net neutral... U pay for respect U get respect)
-Ping is regularly good, mediocre during peak.
-Connectivity is TERRIBLE. Service cuts out regularly at all times of the day,
especially during peak. Can not play ranked games during peak, my ranks
are suffering due to disconnections. Radio / Video streams stop when buffers
are set too small. Timeouts are regularly as long as 25 - 90 seconds. Sometimes
its not ping, its flat out network errors and timeouts.
-Payment terms / Options / Penalties / Late fees: AWESOME. Superb payment terms.
The report, based on the results of 52 million speed tests of broadband users across the G7 countries and Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) membership, was produced by Montreal-based consulting firm Lemay Yates Associates Inc. on behalf of Rogers Communications Inc.
I stopped to LoL at Lemay Yates...then I fell out of my chair seeing who commissioned it. Polish a turd, it's still a turd....polish a turd with a turd...and well...
Consider this:
1) "50Mb down / 5Mb up" Shaw broadband connection
2) Shaw speed test, download around 38Mb/s, upload around 4Mb/s (about correct)
3) 5 servers in various multi-homed datacenters around North america (Cyberwurx, iWeb, Ubiquity Seattle, etc)
4) Each of the 5 servers above can easily xfer at least 10Mb/s between each other synchronously without breaking a sweat.
5) "50Mb down / 5Mb up" Shaw connection, download/upload test to all 5 servers: Max of only 400Kb/s down, 300Kb/s up!!
Yup .. Shaw sucks, and you only get the quoted speeds between your cable modem and their own datacenter. Their network beyond that is either crap, or throttled to death. Telus isn't much better; a 30Mb/s fiber connection at work can only double Shaw's speed with the same test.
Rogers cheats the bandwidth tests by using "speedboost" technology which temporarily allows for a much faster connection for the first few megabytes then rapidly drops the speed to the normal level.
This inflates their broadband scores dramatically and does not reflect reality.
I live in the rather sparsely populated areas of northern Sweden (Luleå) and have a free 100mbit connection as part of my rental apartment (as do quite a lot of people).
By the way, the abundant bandwidth (and the nice cold climate, suitable for cooling - the temperature is -40C/F at some places further inland at this moment) is why Facebook chose to construct its enormous data centers up here.
I work for one of the bigger ISPs in Canada which isn't Rogers (should make it easy to figure out which) and we're suppose to be the fastest -broadband- (note that we're leaving fiber out of this) providers in North America. Our company has recently seen a 5 fold increase in our Internet speeds (out goal is to offer 250 Mbps) in some area, with that to be expected to be the norm in all areas within a year (so I figure a year an a half). If other companies are doing the same, and if a competitive market is doing its job then I hope they are, I can see this study becoming a reality. That being said though I'd love to see a study -not- done by one of the main Canadian ISPs and only then will I believe the propaganda.
"produced by Montreal-based consulting firm Lemay Yates Associates Inc. on behalf of Rogers Communications Inc."
So this study was done by a Canadian Firm paid for by one of the two telcos that have a state sponsored duopoly. This in response to the CRTC, a body that is supposed to be regulating the industry, but which really is just in the pocket of the two companies, gets a record amount of complaints about how shitty internet is in Canada and how expensive it is and an international report that puts Canada on the dummy list of have not "developed" but expensive slow internet.
This is PURE FUD and propaganda on the part of Rogers Communications trying to convince the sheeple that everything is fine, nothing to see here, move alone, and keep paying us for status quo.
For those of you that quote the ULTIMATE plans from Rogers, or the FIBER plans from Bell, or even those quoting plans from independents like Teksavvy, know that ALL of those are only availbale in limited areas. By limited areas I mean, Toronto, Montreal (where study was from), Vancouver, etc... The largest cities in Canada. If you don't live in a megacity, you get squat for squat.
I live in a city called Peterborough, Ontario pop 70-80k people, so not a "rural" area. Best plan is Rogers (Cogeco Cable) 14MB/s 80GB cap. This up from 6 months ago where it was 12MB/s 60GB cap (so admittedly some improvement, sort of). For this service I pay 60$ a month, and it did have a 30$ (1.5$/GB) cap on excess bandwidth, which they moved to 50$ after the speed increase (of course). So if I use 115GB of bandwidth, my monthly bill will be 110$ a month. JUST for internet.
This BS just shows how out of touch Rogers and Canadian Telecommunications are with reality. They really need a wake up call!
I am living in Spain. I used to complain a lot. Expensive and not-so-fast Internet.
Now I think expensive: yes
Fast: It depends. I see companies abroad giving out 20Mbps and more and you test the connection at the end point and that does not measure up. I am pretty happy with my 12Mbps, it gives me the right speed for that connection.
And the final one: What is all this crap of network caps?!?! Some 1GB per month I read? Well, if you don't want 1080 films and you are not a gamer maybe it is OK... My Vodafone connection NO CAPS and if they cap me I am gone.
Same with filtering, I am gone. the point is: Why the hell do I need a 12, 20 or more Mpbs connection to check my Gmail for?!?!
ISPs, if you keep capping and filtering you'd better start providing those good ol' 128k connections because that is what we are going to ask for to check the mail, quotes and... the other stuff.