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.

Tuesday, April 03, 2007

New Rogers Portable Internet Site and News

Rogers Portable Internet service has a new website, and according to it, service may already be available in many parts of rural Ottawa through the use of an outdoor modem.

I checked the Kars postal code using the online form provided on the webpage, and service is reportedly available in the area using an outdoor modem. As well, the reader who notified me of the new website said that he can also get service near Ashton if he uses an outdoor modem.

The downsides of using an outdoor modem appear to be two-fold:

  1. It's not portable, as it mounts to th exterior of your house, a pole, etc. For portability, you will need to also get the portable modem.

  2. The outdoor modem costs 2.5x that of the portable modem; the outdoor modem costs $249.95 (at the time of writing this blog entry), whereas the portable modem costs $99.95

However, to anyone in real need (or want) of high-speed access, these points are probably mimor.

The outdoor modem is a non-LOS (non-line-of-sight) wireless modem, and you have to install it yourself (Rogers does provide a 30-page installation guide). Rogers is claiming speeds comparable to DSL or cable, with two packages available (a 128 Kbps package and a 1.5 Mbps package).

Please consult the referenced website for more and up-to-date info.

posted by Chris Spencer at 6:54 pm 0 comments

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