High Speed Internet Coming to Rural Areas

The Canadian Radio Television Commission (C.R.T.C.) announced yesterday that broadband internet should be a basic service that should be available to all Canadians.

In their ruling, they are ordering the country’s internet providers to begin work on providing service and faster internet speeds to all parts of the country including rural and remote areas.

The C.R.T.C. estimates that right now close to 18% or about 2 million Canadian households don’t have access to those higher speeds or data in those remote areas.  To make all of  this happen, the C.R.T.C. is ordering the internet providers to pay into a fund that should grow to about $750 million over the next 5 years.  The companies will be able to use funds from the fund to help with infrastructure costs to get high-speed to where it isn’t available at the moment.

Last week, the federal government announced it would be investing up to $500 million to bring high-speed, broadband internet access to 300 rural and remote communities by 2021.

Yesterday, the C.R.T.C. also mentioned they would like to see an improvement in dropped call issues and also improvements to customer warnings for data over-usage.

So, the good news is internet and cell phone coverage should improve, the bad news is, you know who’ll end up paying for all of this in the end.