CRTC Chair Calls Out Bell Canada For Failing on Rural Broadband Commitments |
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Wednesday June 06, 2012
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Unfortunately, it's a different story with Bell Canada and Bell Aliant. Nearly two years after we issued our directive, Bell has extended broadband service to only three of its 112 communities. Broadband service is more and more of a necessity for full participation in the digital economy and in our life as Canadians. The funds were collected over a number of years from Bell subscribers. I urge our friends at Bell to give a higher priority to the needs of the people in these rural and remote communities by accelerating their rollout plans. The deadline to complete the broadband rollout is 2014. The deferral account case involves hundreds of millions of dollars collected by large telephone providers as surplus funds. In 2010, the CRTC ordered a portion be refunded to consumers and remainder spent on broadband services. Comments (7)
Wilf Lefresne
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The Rest of the Story I am not an unbridled supporter of Bell but sometimes they are wrongly attacked. Mr. Katz has conveniently forgot that Rogers challenged the CRTC ruling by means of an appeal to the Governor-in-Council. This legal process was only finalized in Feb of this year. Rogers lost. I know I would be hesitant to proceed if I was involved in a legal action. |
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broadband cost me $145.00 last month That's just internet boys, phone is more yet. Community is small, house sales slow to non-existent. May have to let house go back to bank to leave community for more affordable net. ps internet is about 30 bucks for high speed in Saskatoon. Work on Linux distros and downloading is necessary and usually involves isos. Phone and internet runs about 220 a month. 1 hour out of Saskatoon bullshit expensive options, yup that's Saskatchewans' idea of rural broadband solutions. |
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Wireless "dialup" I am 40 minutes south of Ottawa, between Kemptville and Winchester, both of which have real broadband. All we have access to is Xplornet wireless, which to say the least is not broadband, let alone high speed. As a matter of fact, I refuse to call it anything but wireless dialup. I realize that real high speed (wired) will never come out to rural areas, however, I do wish that an affordable stable option was available. Oh yeah, there is one - 295.ca ;) |
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@Colin.p I agree. I live near the Franktown Doppler Radar (near Ottawa) and while wireless highspeed is theoretically available (at 3 Mbps) for about $50 per month (50 GByte cap), there are holes in the coverage as a result of topology of the land. I am in one of those holes, and my neighbour, when they first signed up, could only get reliable service in the winter. |
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Rural Wireless Dialup I Really like the comment on Rural Wireless Dial up, i will start using it in the future. Frankly 50Gigs is lucky we have xplornet and a couple smaller companies and the best they offer is 5 Gigs a month download, at max 1.5gigabits per second rate. and that's at 50+ dollars a month. if i want a 5 Gigabit per second download at 10 Gigabyte limit a month i would have to pay 80-90 dollars a month. its almost cheaper to get a fibre line to my house from Shaw in the city and pay the 45$ a month for 10X better download rate and unlimited download limit. |
We want to enhance competition and investment in this country, and this is why we adopted this policy back in 2008 for the AWS spectrum. Let me say that the price went down by an average of 11% since then, and we will continue this way with the 700 megahertz spectrum. We launched consultation with the industry to make sure that we enhance competition and provide better choice and better rates for our consumers.
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