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, July 16, 2007

Latest Happenings

Xplornet is active in my area. Late last week, I received a phone from someone at Xplornet. They were following up on my early inquests about service in my area (e.g. the hinterland between Manotick and Kars). All fine and good, except for the fact that I hadn't inquired into Xplornet since getting fixed wireless from Arryba (and Storm) about 21 months ago. Better late than never, I guess, and at least they (Xplornet) appear to be making good on their stated plans to blanket rural Ottawa with high-speed access by summer's end.

The rumour mill has Xplornet erecting towers and seeking out farmers' silos and other tall buildings throughout rural Ottawa. I have no info on exact locations and already-active coverage areas. If you have any info, please post.

Has anyone out there recently gotten hooked-up with Xplornet? If so, please post your comments. Do you have wireless or satellite? Were you happy with the installation and sign-up process? Are you happy with the service to-date?

posted by Chris Spencer at 9:58 pm 2 comments

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I am one of the homes in the ottawa area that is for the moment having to use Explornet's satelite high speed internet service. It works, it isn't fast, it's expensive to make it fast, you get FAPed, (fair access policy) quite often, which slows it down more. You are also affected by bad weather etc.

August 30, 2007 2:50 pm  
Blogger Chris Spencer said...

Hopefully you'll soon be covered by fixed wireless. My experience with Arryba/Storm's fixed wireless is that bad weather (e.g. snow, heavy rain, T&L, fog) isn't a big factor -- it might sometimes slow down the connection but doesn't drop it. I'm not getting anything close to the 3 Mbps peak download speeds that Storm lists on their web page (which I was with Arryba and it's the same gear) but I'm still getting enough b/w to Netmeet and VoIP at the same time.

August 30, 2007 9:20 pm  

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