Friday, March 5, 2010
High-Speed Internet Access in Canada: It's Expensive & Slow
Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home Talk" @ 08:00 AM
I'm feeling a bit miffed lately after talking with my cable company, Shaw Calgary, so excuse me while I rant about high-speed Internet access in Canada for a bit.
For several years, I've been paying about $50 CAD (about $50 USD) per month for high-speed Internet access that was eventually bumped up to 25mbps downstream speeds, and 1 mbps upstream speeds. The reliability has been excellent - I recall perhaps one period of down-time in the past year - and the 25mbps downstream speeds are sufficiently zippy for my needs. 99% of the time, the bottleneck on my downloads is the server at the other end. When I connect to a fast server, such as downloading NVIDIA graphics drivers for instance, it's not uncommon to see 2MB/s download speeds. The 1mbps upstream speed, however, was always a source of frustration for me. I shoot a lot of photos and videos, and when you're uploading 600 MB of JPEGs or an 800 MB HD video file, uploading at 1mbps is a painfully slow process, requiring hours. My ISP has been constantly ratcheting up download speeds, which is great, but the upload speeds have been between 512kbps and 1mbps (depending on the account) for years.
Pricing is also a concern; this article by Michael Geist has some shocking facts that are worth digging in to: Canada ranks 14th in the world in terms of high-speed accessing being affordable. Consumers in the UK pay an average of $30 USD equivalent, while we in Canada pay an average of $45 USD equivalent. That's a 50% hike! To put that into direct context, my ISP (Shaw) charges $33/month for their cheapest package if you don't also have other services from them. The speed of this $33 package? A sluggish 1mbps download speed and glacial 256kbps upload speeds. Oh, and a 10 GB/month bandwidth cap as an extra kick in the head. Read more...
