Welcome to the self-proclaimed Rural Ottawa High-Speed Internet Blog. High-speed Internet access is virtually ubiquitous in the urban and suburban areas of Ottawa, but when I started this blog in 2005, only about 60% of the rural areas of Ottawa have coverage. However, even for rural citizens, high-speed Internet access is becoming as necessary as telephone service. Happily, high-speed coverage for rural Ottawa has increased significantly, and not only is coverage reportedly above 90%, many rural residents and businesses now have more than one choice of high-speed ISP.

This purpose of this weblog is to track news and events related to high-speed (broadband) Internet access in the rural areas of Ottawa and, to a lesser extent, in nearby townships.

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I've opened up this blog to allow anyone to post to it. However, I continue to moderate and will remove any inappropriate content, e.g. anything not related to high-speed internet access in the rural Ottawa, the Ottawa Valley, Eastern Ontario, and the Outaouais.

Monday, October 24, 2005

Arryba Communications -- Open House

Here are the important parts of an email that I recently received from ORCnet:



Some great news! Here's another important milestone in the effort to make high-speed Internet available to all residents in the City of Ottawa.

Arryba Communications Inc. has launched a new wireless broadband service in the southeastern area of the city with plans to expand quickly to other rural areas in Ottawa. Already they have 7 nodes up and are aggressively seeking to bring high-speed Internet to other communities throughout rural Ottawa.

Arryba is planning an Open house on the first of November I hope you can come. Here are the details:

- Arryba Communications Inc. Open House
- Tuesday, November 1, drop-in 3:00 to 8:00 pm, official ribbon cutting 7:00 pm
- Vernon Community Centre, 7950 Lawrence Street, Vernon

Drop by the Vernon Community Centre on November 1st to see live demonstrations of just how fast Arryba's Internet service really is and verify if it is (or will be) available in your area. Ask questions, have a snack, and enter to win a variety of cool door prizes for the whole family.

Here is some additional information about the company:

Launched in southern rural Ottawa earlier this year, Arryba is an innovative provider of high speed and high bandwidth communication services. The company primarily uses wireless technologies to bring high speed internet to a growing list of small communities outside the economic reach of main-line telephone and cable companies. Arryba is not just an Internet service provider. The company also offers a suite of broadband services such as long distance calling plans, e-fax, VivaVault(r) (data back-up and recovery), SmartFarm(r) (instant access to targeted services such as weather and crop reports, etc. that connect farmers everywhere), tele-education and tele-medicine.

To find out more about Arryba and their services, visit www.arryba.com or call 1-888-203-0411.

posted by Chris Spencer at 3:32 pm 0 comments

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I have high-speed!

Today (October 22, 2005), Arryba Communications installed their fixed wireless high-speed Internet service at my home. A crew of three showed up, quickly determined that they could get a single from the tower at First Line & Century Roads, installed the tripod, mast, and antenna, ran cable from the antenna to my office, and configued and tested my PC. The whole process took less than 2 hours.

I've done some quick tests. I've sent emails, connected to my work (Nortel) via VPN, surfed the web, banked online, updated some anti-spyware apps, and ran a couple of download speed tests. All in all, I would have to say that I'm quite happy with the service and the speed. (Aside: average results from my three test at http://www.testmy.net was 763 Kbps, which is a little slower than expected. It is still much faster than dial-up -- 23x faster than the 32 Kbps that I normally get with dial-up -- and Arryba did warn me of some latency, which they are working to reduce. When I had DSL in Kanata, I often wasn't seeing speeds over 700 Kbps. )

I am not yet setup with my Arryba email addresses or webspace, but I expect that will happen sometime next week. (Let's face it, they installed on a Saturday and finished up about 5pm.)

Arryba also informed me that they had just installed service at other homes further south on First Line. If you have recently gotten high-speed service (and haven't already told me so), please let me know. Despite my having high-speed, I'm planning on maintaining my high-speed neighbourhood watch until high-speed Internet service is available throughout the area.

If you signed-up with Arryba but do not yet have service, then you will probably have it shortly. Steve Shauland, CTO of Arryba, informed me that they've been working 7 days a week to meet the demands for their service throughout Ottawa south. I think the fact that they installed a couple of homes on First Line on a Saturday is testment to that.

October 24, 2005:

I've optimized my PC for 'cable modem' using SpeedGuide.net's free TCPOptimizer (I selected the default Cable modem options -- which adjusted my WinXP registry settings as per SpeedGuide's Windows 2000/XP Registry Tweaks), and repeated by download tests using http://www.testmy.net's SmartTest. I'm now seeing average download rates of 1.8+ Mbps. Previously, my PC had been optimized for dial-up. Caveat: I'm not sure if Arryba has done anything at their end; I plan to do some more testing in the next few days and weeks.

posted by Chris Spencer at 3:22 pm 0 comments

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