Digital Home Thoughts: High-Speed Internet Access in Canada: It's Expensive & Slow

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.

Back to Canada on the world stage: we rank 24th out of 30 countries in terms of speed. Fibre-optics based Internet access has 48% penetration in Japan, while in Canada we have essentially 0% penetration. Bell Canada has recently launched Fibe, a fibre-optics service that boasts 25mbps download speeds and 7mbps upload speeds. In a typical corporate twist of the knife, however, all plans have 1mbps upload speed until you get up to the most expensive plan ($52.95 CAD/month) when the upload speed jumps from 1mbps to 7mbps.

I'd gladly pay $53/month to get 7mbps upload speeds, but Fibe is an Eastern-Canada only service for now. Back to Geist's article: he says that once factor in the price and speed of Canadian high-speed Internet access, Canada ranks 28th out of the 30th countries included in this study. The only countries lower than us are Mexico and Poland. That's depressing. Adding insult to injury, Canada is one of only four countries in this study that implements bandwidth caps on their customers (strangely, the USA isn't listed there - but I'm sure there are US ISPs that have bandwidth caps).

Back to my own Internet access: as I began to produce more video content last year, the 1mbps upload speed grew increasingly frustrating. I bit the bullet and upgraded to the next package, which more than doubled the cost of my Internet package (from $45 CAD up to $96 CAD). What did I get for that doubling? Double the upload speed - 2mbps. The download speed also went from 15mbps to 25mbps, but I routinely benchmarked the 15mbps service clocking in at 19mbps, so getting the bump to 25mbps was worthless. Besides, it's pretty hard to find a server that can dish up 3.1 MB/s real-world download speeds to begin with.

Doubling my upload speed really helped me do my job better, but I fumed at the $96/month it was costing me. I have my cable and phone service from Shaw as well, so my bill was well north of $200/month with them. My hope was the DOCSIS 3.0 roll-out, which allows for channel bonding and massively increased speeds. I was expecting that when Shaw implemented DOCSIS 3.0, it would mean an across-the-board increase in both upload and download speeds. I was pining for even faster upload speeds of course, as friends in the US told me about their 5mbps upload speeds.

So what did Shaw do when DOCSIS 3.0 arrived? They unveiled a new top-end package that cost an stunning $149/month, and did nothing to improve any of their lower-cost packages. This expensive package offers an impressive 5mbps upstream and 100mbps downstream speeds...but $149/month? What brand of hallucinogens are they taking to think that even the most die-hard consumers will pay that much for Internet access? As much as I want 5mbps upload speeds, the thought of tripling my Internet package cost makes my blood boil.

In a free market-based economy, competition is the key to better services at lower prices for consumers. The only credible competition to Shaw in Calgary, there city where I live, is Telus - our old-school land-line telco. They offer DSL packages, but their "turbo" package tops out at 15mbps downstream and 1mbps upstream for $45/month. DSL has lagged behind cable Internet access for years, and short of Telus deploying Fibre-based services, they're simply no challenge to Shaw.

Meanwhile, a friend in Sweden tells me he pays the equivalent of around $50 USD for 1gbps upstream and downstream - no, that's not a typo. It's a fibre optics-based system that, at those speeds, would essentially eliminate your end as being the bottleneck - the upload or download would generally go as fast as the server on the other end could send or receive the data. He's not alone, as multiple networks around the world are reaching 1gbps. Meanwhile, those of us in Canada are "smurfing the Interweb" like it's 2002. Things have got to improve here, but the number of things that would need to change to improve the situation are daunting.

What's Internet access like where you are dear readers?

Jason Dunn owns and operates Thoughts Media Inc., a company dedicated to creating the best in online communities. He enjoys photography, mobile devices, blogging, digital media content creation/editing, and pretty much all technology. He lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada with his lovely wife, his son Logan, and his sometimes obedient dog. He wishes there was more competition in all sorts of Canadian markets.

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