Some Canadians may not have to wait for Google Fiber to meander through the Midwest United States before getting their own taste of Gigabit Internet speeds, as a new Vancouver-based startup is hoping launch its own fibre Internet service.
OneGigabit bills itself as Vancouver’s fastest Internet Service Provider (ISP), promising to offer 1-10 Gbps (gigabit per second) speeds for $45 to $65 a month with unlimited usage. For comparison, Google Fiber offers their Gigabit Internet plan in Kansas City for $70 a month, which has received very warm reception from potential customers. OneGigabit’s business model lies in providing fibre-optic networks to small and medium-sized office and apartment buildings. Incumbent ISPs like Bell, Telus and Rogers are working towards providing fibre-optic networks to their customers, but they typically only offer ranges of up to 250 Mbps (megabits per second) in best case scenarios, charging upwards of $200 per month for those packages. The incumbents usually only offer these services to very large buildings in urban centres, where it is most economical to do so.
Fibre-optic networks can be challenging to install as they require end-to-end fibre-optic cables to provide the promised high speeds. Upgrading the main segment of the network can be easier logistically as only one segment of wires must be replaced in a neighbourhood, but replacing the line from the street-level cable box to each building can be challenging and costly as there is a lower return on street-to-building wiring, particularly if one replaces a wire connecting rural or suburban homes. OneGigabit hopes to somewhat nullify the logistical headaches and extra costs associated with replacing wiring to the building by partnering with property developers while the buildings are under construction, so that the wiring to the building is already set up to include fibre-optic cabling. As a backup plan for buildings that cannot easily replace the network cables, OneGigabit hopes to use microwave transmitters much like those used in the wireless industry to beam high speed Internet to homes.
If OneGigabit implements enough of their fibre network to attract interest from other cities, there’s the potential that a larger company such as Google may demonstrate interest in purchasing them and expanding the network. This was done in April in Provo, Utah, where Google announced their intention to purchase the city’s home-grown network iProvo, which was suffering from cost overruns and underuse. Google offered little explanation for why they purchased the system from Provo City Council, yet the incredibly high cost and time requirement of building any such network is a good indicator that Google saw this as an opportunity to expand to another city without having to go through the slow development process and high cost of rolling out the network. This is the process they are currently undergoing in Kansas City, their first supported city, where residents sign up within “Fiberhoods” to gain enough support to build fibre-optic networks in their neighbourhoods.
The price of Google’s Kansas-based fibre-optic network so far has been expected to be in the range of $100 million, and analysts have estimated that if Google built out to 20 million more urban homes, it would cost them in the range of $11 billion, which would place them in the market at an above-average size for a nationwide provider. The high implementation cost will prevent Google from expanding too fast too soon, but building out partnerships like the one in Provo may be advantageous for earning Google more money to use as an investment fund for their future network expansions. Their Austin expansion is expected to start taking requests in 2014, and it is likely Google will find another high-usage city, like those in the San Francisco Bay Area, to choose as their next project.
In Canada, Google likely won’t be here for a while, if ever, and OneGigabit is probably sticking to Vancouver for the time being. In Ontario, for now, we are mostly relegated to relying on Rogers and Bell to provide our highest speed connections. If Google is not ready start laying fibre networks in Ontario or Québec in the near future, there could be a good business model in starting fibre networks in Toronto, Ottawa and Montréal, where there is a large enough population at a high enough density that they could support a pilot project for fibre networks to businesses and homes in the area.
Many of the country’s top universities and corporate head offices are located in these cities, and would probably be the groups most willing to support these investments. Gigabit Internet is good for universities and research groups that need to support thousands of people and would open up opportunities for Internet-based research and offloading tasks to servers throughout the campuses they support. Universities already have some of the highest Internet speeds in most countries, and fibre would enable them to unlock new possibilities in research and connectivity that would encourage further learning and development. Corporate offices would be able to incorporate more adventurous productivity initiatives, such as higher-resolution video-conferencing and more offloading of office services into cloud-based offerings. Many offices make use of server-based storage for user files and often store these servers in centralized locations, accessing them from offices throughout the countries in which they are stored. In Ottawa, improving the network infrastructure could help governments make more use of their Internet resources, and by extension, encourage better use of their Internet services to improve access for citizens across Canada.
Until more is heard from fibre-optic network companies, we will have to work with the slower networks we have now to accomplish our tasks, but the possibilities of laying out fibre-optic networks, while expensive, would change how we view our Internet resources greatly and the productivity cost saved by spending less time waiting for connections to complete would be unimaginable.
Leave a Reply