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.

Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Rogers Portable Internet availability tool

I just noticed this, and thought I'd pass it on. Rogers has recently improved their Portable Internet Availability Tool.

Previously, it would ask you for your postal code, and for some of us rural folks, that can be a big area and the service availability would thus be indeterminant.

The new version (and I'm not sure how long it's been this way) will ask you for your address or the nearest intersection, and it will display a colour-coded map which will indicate if you can use an indoor modem or if you will have to get an outdoor modem installed. Even if the search tool cannot find your address or intersection, you can simply select your home city from the MapControl widgit, and then drag the resulting map to your neighbourhood to see what, if any, Portable Internet service is available to you.

Portable Internet (standard) has peak advertised speeds of 1.5 Mbps down and 256 Kbps up (~26x dial-up down and 4x dial-up up). The lite version, Rogers Portable Internet Basic, has peak download speeds of 256 Kbps (4x dial-up); no upload speed posted.
Please refer to the above links or go to Rogers main site for more details.

posted by Chris Spencer at 1:24 pm 0 comments

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