Atlantic Canada build to begin in the fall
MONTREAL – Bell Canada today announced customers of its rural Wireless Home Internet service will be able to take advantage of speeds up to 50 Megabits per second download and 10 Mbps upload this fall.
The company added it will start to build the service into rural Atlantic Canada then, too. It plans to cover up to 150,000 rural households in the east.
“We’re pleased to take this unique technology further by doubling Internet download speeds available to rural communities while also beginning our rollout of WHI service throughout Atlantic Canada,” said Mirko Bibic, president and CEO of BCE and Bell Canada in the company’s press release.
“The intense usage of Wireless Home Internet and positive feedback from our rural customers throughout the Covid-19 crisis underscored how important fast and reliable broadband connections are to ensuring communities both large and small will be part of Canada’s move forward,” he added.
Earlier in the Covid-19 crisis, Bell accelerated the rollout of WHI to cover more rural Canadians faster. The Atlantic rollout is part of the one million homes the company promised to cover with its initial WHI build.
The new 50/10 service will initially be offered to approximately 300,000 homes in 325 communities in Ontario, Québec and the Atlantic provinces starting this fall, explained the release. Some of the first communities that will receive 50/10 service include: Selwyn, Trent Hills and Wilmot in Ontario; Dunham, Messines, Saint Adolphe d’Howard and Sutton in Québec; Doaktown, New Brunswick; Guysborough, Nova Scotia; Kensington, PEI; and Burgeo, Newfoundland and Labrador.
WHI (which is funded by Bell and doesn’t draw on any government broadband funding) is designed to bring broadband Internet access to homes in rural communities and other hard-to-reach locations by leveraging Bell’s wireless networks – which will include upgrades to 5G service as that standard comes on stream.
“Bell developed Wireless Home Internet specifically to ensure that rural Canada can share in all the opportunities of our digital future,” said Stephen Howe, Bell’s chief technology officer, in the release.
WHI is already available to approximately 400,000 households in Ontario and Québec with download speeds of 25 Mbps.
“Wireless Home Internet is ready to enable all the speed and capacity capabilities of fixed 5G Internet access in future by leveraging additional 3500 MHz spectrum following the federal wireless spectrum auction in 2021,” added Howe.
