In full election platforms released last week, the NDP is promising to implement changes to Canadian privacy law and look into Internet of Things (IoT) privacy, the Conservatives are pledging funding for rural broadband and cyber-security, and the Liberals say they would improve access to online government services. The NDP said in its platform, released Friday, that if it wins the Oct. 19 federal election, it will put together an all-party committee to look at privacy issues relating to IoT. It promised to consult with “business, IT experts and concerned citizens on how to protect...
BCE Inc.’s Bell Aliant announced Tuesday it has enhanced its FibreOP Internet service for Atlantic Canada by increasing download speeds up to 1 Gbps. Bell Aliant said in a press release that the service, called Gigabit FibreOP, will initially offer customers download speeds of 940 Mbps and will later increase to a full gigabit in 2016. “Gigabit FibreOP is available in more than 100 communities across Atlantic Canada,” Dan McKeen, senior vice-president of residential services at Bell Aliant, said in the release. “Residents in communities big and small now have access...
Axia NetMedia Corp. announced last week it is building fibre-optic Internet connections in additional rural communities in Alberta, which will be operational next year. It said in a press release Thursday that construction is...
Fibrant, a telecom company owned and operated by the City of Salisbury in North Carolina, and Calix Inc., a telecom equipment provider, announced this week that Salisbury, N.C., has become first city in the United States to get...
Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Wednesday that, if re-elected, he will put another $200 million into fibre-based infrastructure for rural and remote locations currently lacking high-speed Internet. “Quite simply, there...
The office of U.S. President Barack Obama on Wednesday announced a program to bring broadband Internet to 275,000 low-income households across the country, in partnership with local governments and...
The proportion of Canadians connected to the Internet by fibre is rising and these people are more satisfied with their Internet service than others, according to market research data released Thursday. J.D. Power and Associates said in press release that its most recent study of Internet service satisfaction in the country showed 18 per cent of Canadians reporting a fibre-optic connection, up from 15 per cent a year earlier. Internet customers on fibre reported a satisfaction level of 698 out of 1,000, J.D. Power said. Those getting Internet through cable had a satisfaction score of...
Telus Corp. said Friday it will be expanding its fibre-optic network in Edmonton to connect directly to more than 90 per cent of homes and businesses in the city over the next six years. The company said in a press release that...
BCE Inc.’s Bell Aliant announced Monday that its new data centre in Saint John, N.B. is now fully functional and open for business. The new $25 million data centre met the Tier III certification from the Uptime Institute,...
The CRTC should not give small Internet service providers the right to buy wholesale space on fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) networks, a new report from the Montreal Economic Institute says. A report released Thursday, written by...
A subsidiary of a Chinese fibre-optics company said Friday it has established Vancouver as its North American headquarters. F-Pacific, a division of China Fiber Optic Network System Group Ltd., had...
Saskatchewan Telecommunications Holding Corp. said Tuesday that it has officially launched its fibre-to-the-home Internet service in Swift Current, Sask. SaskTel said in a press release that some customers have already been...
Athletes from across two continents competing in the 2015 Pan American Games in Toronto this summer will be able to connect with family and friends back home via high-speed fibre Internet connections...
The CRTC said Thursday that unless a developer provides BCE Inc. "timely access" to a Toronto condominium building about to accept new occupants, the other service providers that have been...
Urban Communications Inc. said Thursday it has launched its gigabit Internet connections for business customers in Vancouver. The company, which also offers 1 Gbps residential service, said in a...
Telus Corp. said Wednesday it will spend $4 billion on infrastructure and facilities in its home province of British Columbia over the next four years, including $1 billion this year. The company said in a press release that the investment will include the expansion of its fibre-optic network, as well as the addition of LTE to every wireless site in the province. "Telus is unwavering in our long-standing commitment to create opportunities for British Columbians by making the province one of the most connected places on the planet," Darren Entwistle, Telus’ executive chairman,...
Saskatchewan Telecommunications Holding Corp. said Thursday it plans to make about $313 million in capital expenditures in its home province this year, including $177 million on what it calls its "core Saskatchewan...
Telus Corp. said Monday it will spend $4.2 billion on infrastructure and facilities in Alberta between now and the end of 2018, including $1 billion in the current year. The company said in a press release that, when combined...
Small Internet service providers are taking the lead on providing gigabit Internet service in Canada, in contrast to the United States where Internet giant Google Inc. is pioneering efforts to bring...
Urban Communications Inc. said Thursday it has launched the first gigabit Internet service for Canadian residential users. The company said in a news release the service will cost $49 a month for...
Telus Corp. is spending $100 million to provide access to a fibre optic network to 90 per cent of the homes and businesses in the British Columbia communities of Kelowna and West Kelowna, it said Tuesday. It said in a press release that work began on the project in the fall and it expects the final premises to be connected by the spring of 2016. Telus said the connections will provide Internet speeds of up to 100 Mbps. It said the advanced network will help sectors such as health care, education and technology, and it will provide more reliability for home-based entertainment, alluding to...
BCE Inc. announced Monday that the latest upgrade to the software for its Fibe TV service adds the ability to rewind and restart programs already in progress. The new Restart feature, which functions even if a user has not...
Bell Aliant Inc. said in a press release Thursday that it will extend its fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) network to another 4,177 premises in three communities in New Brunswick. It added that it has invested $122 million since 2009 to...
The Competition Bureau said Wednesday that Bell Aliant Inc. has responded to the bureau's concerns surrounding its purchase of an Ontario-government-owned telecommunications provider. The bureau said in a press release Bell...
Bell Aliant Inc. said Monday that fibre-to-the-home connections are now available in Quebec, with three communities on its FibreOP network immediately and four more to be connected before the end of the year. Bell Aliant said in...
Data released by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development on Tuesday shows Canada falls well short of the average of economically advanced countries in terms of wireless-broadband...
Quebecor Inc.'s Videotron said Wednesday it has revamped its high-speed Internet plans to offer, in some cases, double the speed at a similar price. The company said in a press release it was...
Bell Labs, the research arm of French telecom hardware maker Alcatel-Lucent, announced on Wednesday that it has set a new broadband speed record of 10 gigabits per second over traditional copper telephone lines. In a press...
Telus Corp. said Wednesday it will invest $1.1 billion in technology infrastructure in Ontario between now and 2016. It said in a press release that the money will go toward expanding its wireless network, bringing fibre-optic...
Lakeland Networks, an Internet service provider for businesses in Ontario’s cottage country north of Toronto, said it will become the first in Ontario to offer speeds as fast as one gigabit per second. The service will be available to businesses and public agencies in the Muskoka and Almaguin regions in April, Lakeland Networks said in a press release issued Tuesday. Bill Gispen, manager of Lakeland Networks, said in an email Thursday that the company does not provide residential service. It said the speed of 1 Gbps, delivered by a fibre-optic network, is about 50 times faster than...
Bell Aliant Inc. said Wednesday it is expanding its fibre-optic network to three towns in Newfoundland, making its FibreOP service available to an additional 8,100 homes and businesses. Harbour Grace, Deer Lake and Stephenville...
Network builder Ciena Corp. reported a smaller loss for its first fiscal quarter than in the same period a year earlier. The company said in a press release Thursday that it lost $15.9 million US in the quarter ended Jan. 31...
The simmering debate over Northern Canada’s telecommunications services heated up again this week as Northwestel Inc. asked the CRTC to re-examine parts of its most recent decision on the...
Manitoba Telecom Services Inc.’s Allstream unit said Wednesday that its national fibre-optic IP network is now hooked up to more than 3,000 buildings. Allstream, which provides communications...
SaskTel is expanding its infiNet fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) network to Prince Albert, Sask., the company said in a release Thursday. It said “customers can expect to have infiNET available to their homes starting in spring 2014, with fibre optics projected to be deployed to all residential areas of the city within a year.” The company is spending $670 million to deploy FTTP and upgrade its broadband network in Saskatoon, Regina, Moose Jaw, Weyburn, Estevan, Swift Current, Yorkton, North Battleford and Prince Albert, SaskTel said....
Cogeco Inc. subsidiary Cogeco Cable Canada said Friday it has reached an agreement with a non-profit operator of a fibre-optic network in Quebec’s Mauricie region to provide high-speed Internet, phone and digital-TV services...
As condo developers erect new high-rise buildings to house the expanding populations of Canada’s largest cities, telecom providers are competing to be the ones to line those buildings with fibre-optic cables, sometimes with...
TORONTO—The CRTC will hold a proceeding to look at whether incumbent Internet service providers should be required to give smaller competitors wholesale access to their fibre-to-the-home...
Telus Corp. said it will roll out a fibre-to-the-home network in Rimouski, Que. as part of a $265 million investment to expand its telecom services in the province in 2013. In a release Wednesday, Telus said the fibre-to-the-home...
The CRTC said it approved Bell Aliant Inc.’s request to offer broadcast distribution services Sault Ste. Marie, Ont. In a decision Thursday, the commission said Bell Aliant can expand its broadcast distribution business to...
Consumer demand for bandwidth and more efficient network builds are allowing Bell Aliant Inc. to roll out its fibre-to-the-home network in communities that were previously seen as not a viable...
The CRTC's review of the “capacity-based billing” rates it established in November 2011 will make or break wholesale Internet services provided by the incumbent cable and telecom...
Three weeks after Hurricane Sandy ripped through the mid-Atlantic and Northeastern United States, Verizon Communications Inc. and other U.S. telecom providers continue to spend millions of dollars to...
MTS Allstream Inc. launched its MTS Fion fibre-to-the-home network in Neepawa, Man., the company said Monday. MTS said in a release the new fibre optic network will bring high-speed Internet and MTS' IPTV service, Ultimate TV, to Neepawa residents. MTS said it is investing $125 million over “several years” to deploy the fibre service to 120,000 residents in Manitoba and that its IPTV service will be available in more than 20 communities. “MTS Ultimate TV is currently available to over 95 per cent of Winnipeg households, and in Brandon, Portage La Prairie and a growing...
BCE Inc. subsidiary Bell Aliant Inc. plans to bring its fibre-to-the-home service to one million homes “in the coming years,” Glen LeBlanc, the company’s executive vice-president and...
BCE Inc. subsidiary Bell Aliant will invest $2.75 million to expand its fibre-to-the-home services into Gander, N.L., later this month, the company said Thursday. In a release, Bell said the investment would allow it to bring its...
A $900 million investment by the Quebec government to bring high-speed broadband connectivity to its unserved and underserved residents over 10 years has made little progress since it was first...
BCE Inc. subsidiary Bell Aliant said Wednesday that it is investing $11.5 million to expand its fibre optic Internet service to 22,000 more homes and businesses in Atlantic Canada. In a release, the company said it will use the...
SaskTel launched a new “fibre to the premises” network service Friday that promises download speeds of up to 200 Mbps, the company said in a release. In the release, SaskTel said its infiNet fibre optic network will be rolled out to more than 40,000 customers by the end of 2012 as the company initially converts its customers in Regina and Saskatoon to the new network. It said the customers will receive a maximum upload speed of 60 Mbps. SaksTel said infiNET is the result of a $670 million investment to deploy fibre to homes and upgrade the broadband network in the communities of...
A CRTC working group plans to file a report to develop a model agreement between telcos and municipalities for access to municipal infrastructure, the commission said Friday. The working group will...
Arctic Fibre Inc. is asking Canadian telecos and government agencies to commit to using its proposed fibre backbone network for Internet services across Canada’s northern territories instead of...