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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Tuesday, April 03, 2007

Bell WiMAX in Home service

Bell is now offering WiMAX in Home high-speed Internet service, which seems to be somewhat similar to Rogers' Outdoor Modem offering mentioned in an earlier posting. Like Rogers' service, it uses an outdoor, house-mounted wireless modem to provide the service.

Bell's WiMAX service is a little different than Rogers Outdoor Modem service, though.

  1. Bell installs the outdoor modem for you.
  2. Bell's top speed is advertised as 2 Mbps, compared to Rogers' 1.5 Mbps... for approximately the same monthly price.
  3. Bell includes 10 hours of dial-up access per month (presumably in case the WiMAX service is down for any reason).
  4. Bell offers more email accounts than the Rogers service.


You can check availability in your area at the Bell Sympatico Unplugged Service Availability Check page.

I checked for my home address, and WiMAX in Home is reportedly available. It also appears to be available in parts of Carp, and probably other areas around rural Ottawa and surroundings.

Call me cynical, but given the recent developments concerning XplorNet, I'm beginning to think that Rogers and Bell are simply trying to grab as many subscribers as possible before XplorNet ramps up. Nothing like a little competition to light a fire under peoples' (and companies') butts.

posted by Chris Spencer at 9:38 pm 1 comments

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Their coverage area maps moved my house by about 10 km, so I'm not sure if their "service availability area" test is reliable. Also their cancellation fees seem exorbitant.

Their website is a bit short on technology descriptions (but great on animations of installers), so it's not clear what frequencies they are using and if this is really WiMax standard.

April 06, 2007 9:41 am  

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