For almost a full month, I have been operating without a wireline internet connection, and the sky hasn’t fallen.
My son had 3 graduate student friends staying with us and you can bet that they were exercising the satellite broadband that has been powering our main internet connection.
The other connection that we have used has been mobile internet, using a USB stick.
It is somewhat strange that the CRTC has asked for comments from people as to whether wireless internet is a substitute for wireline – or for that matter, why is the CRTC asking if mobile telephony is a substitute, when its own communications industry monitoring report found that 8% of households were wireless only as of a year and a half ago.
What, then, is the purpose of the CRTC asking for consumers to answer these questions:
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The answer to your question is that the CRTC needs to know this because they have very little intel on what consumers are doing. They are essentially a passive agency, rather than an active agency like the FCC, which has more investigative powers.
With so many other relevant criteria to evaluate telecom services, it does seem strange for the CRTC to focus on wireless vs wired. This dualism does not get down to the important more relevant issues when evaluating what level of telecom services should be guaranteed Canadians have access to.
What’s amazing is how far behind Canada is in wireline substitution. 8% is a very low number, even the U.S. is closer to 18% IIRC
Can you provide more details about your satellite connection? Are you getting special consideration perhaps?
Some time ago you posted some speed comparisons showing you had a download speed on Speedtest.net in excess of 5 Mbps and an upload speed of .52 Mbps on Xplornet.
This is greater than the best speed of 5Mbps down and 500 Kbps up offered by Xplornet according to their website. Also the service costs of $299.99 plus taxes are far out of line with what a wireline subscriber would pay for similar service. It is also not very affordable for the average residential user that does not have business expense write off options. Most of them use one of the two residential Xplornet packages which do not have the advantage of “brute force” throughput.in the
Speed and throughput per se has never been an issue with satellite. While there are valid complaints about over-subscription and Fair Access Policies (FAP) (or Traffic Management Policy in Xplornet jargon), the real complaint is with the third statistic on the tests – ping time. Your time of 979 ms is far in excess of any requirement needs for real-time activities such as gaming, VoIP, and VPN. Secure websites also bring satellite throughput to a crawl.
Yes, satellite may adequate at some future date, but it is not now. The one and only thing to be said positively about satellite is that it is better than dial-up. I have been using satellite since 2004 in the Algoma District and I am in regular contact with other users. I have yet to meet one regular user with the exception of industry personnel that have any positive comments about satellite. Most use it out of desperation and will drop it like a hot potato if there were a viable alternative.
Satellite is no solution to the tourism industry. A small lodge or motel quickly uses up the FAP limits in hours if not minute when the guests are active. One weather report downloaded by a small nearby airport would FAP the system in an almost perpetual basis.
Nor do I see the next generation of high throughput satellite changing things much. I will continue to monitor their deployment but I suspect they will work well for an initial period but then slowly degrade as they too become over subscribed.
Is it a cost issue or a technical performance issue? You seem to be agreeing that next generation satellite would be fine, until there is a capacity shortage – presumably meaning it is time to launch another bird. Running out of capacity indicates that people are buying the service – a good problem to have, in that it indicates there is demand!
How would you recommend we solve the challenge of connecting remote users? How much money is needed to use “brute force” for a terrestrial solution? Where would that money come from?