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.

Saturday, October 06, 2007

QSat Technologies providing one-way satellite Internet service

QSat, a Quebec company, was brought to my attention this week as a company providing one-way satellite
Internet access in the area. One-way satellite uses a satellite link to receive information,
but uses a phone line and modem to upload sent information. This service seems very similar to the
one-way satellite Internet service that Bell Canada used to provide
through ExpressVu, and which it cancelled in 2005. QSat seems to have improved its offering over that of Bell's old offering, in that it supports v.92 modems on the uplink and it is significantly cheaper than Bell's cancelled service. It is unclear if QSat acts as ISP or just provides the infrastructure; Bell's service required a separate ISP.

While it is my opinion that one-way satellite Internet access is inferior to two-way satellite access, the price of QSat's service may be more in line with household budgets than two-way satellite, which tends to be somewhat more expensive.

posted by Chris Spencer at 1:55 pm 0 comments

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