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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.
I Got 25 Mbps & 200G llimits for almost nothing, and you can add lots of 120G for 40$
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.
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
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
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.
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 $62 for faster service and no caps.
Our internet is far from the best. Bell, Rogers and Telus are classic telco robber barons. They oversell like mad, throttle and cap in such a way as to protect their old phone and TV services, and spend fortunes on advertising to fool us into believing we're not actually getting fucked. If they took half the advertising budget, and spent it on infrastructure upgrades, we'd be the envy of every other crooked G7 nation. With the low-cost, no-nonsense indies it's a lot better, but the grand majority of users are still with the big three due to misplaced loyalty and laziness.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
what? no.
in any areas where population density is a problem, the cable has already been laid for decades now. any equipment upgrades that needed done were also completed many years ago.
in areas where population density is not a problem, "laying cable" is incredibly cheap work, and often subsidized.
the "expense" is that the large telecoms have lobbied their way into regional monopolies, and legally prevent competitors from supplying better products (unlimited packages).
Common slashdot.... this news is complete nonsense.... check real prices here :
http://www.videotron.com/service/internet-services/internet-access/high-speed-internet
56$ 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
Size of Estonia: 17500 square miles
Size of Canada: 3855103 square miles
When you have 200 times as much space, laying cable is expensive.
It is irrelevant how many square miles exist: the question is the distance of the customer from the nearest point of presence of the ISP and how many customers are served from each POP.
the Greater Toronto Area alone, has over 3 times the population of all of estonia concentrated in an area about 1/7th the size.
When you add in the population of the immediate vicinities of the largest cities in Canada
Toronto 5.5 Million
Montreal 3.9 million
Ottawa, 1.1 million
Edmonton 1 million
Calgary 1 million
Vancouver 2.4 million
Quebec City 750 thousand
you have over 50% of the population of the entire county living in cities with large populations larger than 50% of the entire country of Estonia. And much denser than Estonia's average population density.
No one has a right to their *own* opinion. They have a right to the TRUTH.
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.
Things are pretty bad in Ontario, and Bell and Rogers are completely to blame. But get outside Ontario, and things are significantly better in many places.
Here in Victoria, BC, I'm running 100/30Mb through Shaw for fairly reasonable rates (on its own it's about $85/mo, but as we're on a bundle with digital HDTV service we pay less than that -- unfortunately, they don't break it out for the sake of comparison. As I telecommute, I'm fortunate that my employer pays for it anyway), with 500GB of monthly data. They're currently upgrading our area to support 250MB connections, with 1TB of data per month.
Which is WAY better than when I lived in Toronto and was a Rogers customer, or for my family still living in the area (and still using Rogers). They're paying just a little bit less, and aren't even getting 10Mb service. Which, if anything just goes to show that what we should be taking from Roger's paid report here is that other providers outside Roger's coverage area are pulling up the average. Rogers itself still has a lot of work to do to improve their service.
Yaz.
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.