Bell aims to hook 27,000 more Islanders up to higher-speed internet

Bell is bringing its Wireless Home Internet service to Atlantic Canada, making the service available for 27,000 homes in rural P.E.I. over the next two years.

"Over the next two months, approximately 70,000 residences in hundreds of Atlantic Canada communities will get access to fast and reliable broadband service," said Glen LeBlanc, Bell's vice chair, Atlantic, in a news release.

Wireless Home Internet provides download speeds of 50 megabits per second (Mbps) and a 10 Mbps upload speed, meeting a benchmark set by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).

In March, the provincial government laid out a plan that in collaboration with Bell and Xplornet would expand rural broadband internet access. It is unclear whether Monday's announcement affects those plans.

While Wireless Home Internet hits the CRTC benchmark for speed, it is still much slower than Bell's Fibe internet service, which uses a fibre-optic network and has a download speed of up to 1.5 gigabits per second (Gbps).

Fibe also has unlimited monthly usage, while Wireless Home Internet is offered in packages of 100 to 350 GB per month.

Still falls short of fibre optic: research fellow

Reza Rajabiun, a research fellow at the Ted Rogers School of Information Technology Management at Ryerson University who has worked on telecom research projects in Nova Scotia, said the new service from Bell is "better than what is there now, but it is a short-term solution."

He noted in an interview with CBC News that wireless technology is getting better. Yet it still falls short of fibre-optic service of the kind available in urban cores in terms of both reliability and affordability.

That's especially true when there are multiple people using the connection in a household. And if a lot of people in the same area sign up for a particular service, "they have to slow down the service to accommodate everyone" in a practice known as bandwidth throttling.

Check for overage fees

Rajabiun also warned that customers should ask about overage fees when signing up. 

"If it's not unlimited data, the users will be subject to some overage fees if they hit the data cap," he said. "It can hit especially low-income people in rural areas very hard — if you have to use Zoom service or lose your job, for example." 

Also, he said in a follow-up email, "If the service is not unlimited, it does not satisfy the 'basic service' criteria the CRTC established back in 2016." 

That universal service objective, known as Telecom Regulatory Policy 2016-496, can be found on the CRTC's site.

The CRTC wants to ensure that "Canadians, in urban areas as well as in rural and remote areas, have access to voice services and broadband internet access services, on both fixed and mobile wireless networks."

The commission set some criteria to measure the success of its work, including that Canadian business and residential customers be able to access speeds of at least 50 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload, and to be able to subscribe to a service with an unlimited data allowance.

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