Very quietly, Bell Canada has launched a new fiber-based high speed service - 10-to-16 megabits per second - in Montreal. Toronto is up next. The new service is called Sympatico Optimax and is now available for between $65 and $80 a month. One strange thing about this: It has a 75 GB of bandwidth cap! For that price? Is that our net-un-neutral future? Hey Mark (Evans) you got more details?
Bell Canada’s Fiber Moves To Montreal
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1 trackback so far
8:07 AM PT
[...] Now north of the Border Caps are used on all systems (yes even Cable) this is just common sense. Om Malik’s view that this is what the U.S. Net un-neutral future may look like it is way off. How are bandwidth caps un-neutral? The IP traffic is not metered [...]
4 comments so far
4:05 AM PT
Seems more like creative PR. Specs of 16/10 down and 1 up, dependent on local situation package and speeds may “differ”(means less): smells like ADSL2 .
7:14 AM PT
It is ADSL2.
8:07 AM PT
Jon Arnold has a great post on this topic.
(link) launcheso.html
Mark hasn’t gotten around to posting on it.
11:44 AM PT
om,
optimax is being rolled out initially in montreal where bell is facing stiff competition from videotron, a cableco, that has attracted more than 200K cable customers since feb. 2005. the 16MB “guaranteed” connection (bell spent a lot of time stressing the guaranteed part) is part of bell’s $1-billion network upgrade so it can offer high bandwidth services such as IP-TV. this has seen bell move fiber closer to the curb (1KM, or .62 miles) from the CO. bell believes it can compete against the cablecos with FTTN rather than FTTC but the jury is still out on that one. in terms of how optimax is priced, if you sign a two-year contract, you get the $100 modem fee waived.
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