Canada falls short in broadband upload speed ranking

A lack of competition is behind slow upload speeds for Canadian broadband Internet customers, according to analyst Alan Breznick, and only the entry of a disruptive force like Google Inc. will bring the country up to speed. Despite the rollout of new technologies, Canada ranks 55th out of 172 countries when it comes to broadband upload speeds, stuck behind places such as Cambodia, Kenya and Mexico, according to American broadband testing and web diagnostics company Ookla. Canada has slipped down the overall broadband speed rating to 36th in the world, down six spots from June 2011. In the United States, the installation by Google of gigabit Internet service many times faster than conventional broadband connections in cities including Kansas City, Mo., and Austin, Texas, has led to “something of a speed war,” said Breznick, media, telecom and technology analyst with research company Heavy Reading. “ hasn't been an emphasis for any of the Internet providers so far,” he said. The cable Internet connection from Rogers Communications Inc. includes a download speed of up to 35 Mbps and an upload speed of 3 Mbps for $67.99 per month, according to the company's website. A comparable Fibe Internet package from BCE Inc. includes a download speed of 25 Mbps and an upload speed of 10 Mbps for $60.95 per month, after an introductory offer expires, according to the company's website. Rob Goodman, senior director of Internet product management for Rogers, said the company spends "a significant amount of capital" on meeting their customers' "need for speed" on its cable Internet network. "We continue to invest both on upload and download speed technologies,” he said. “We will continue to do so as customers demand it and in anticipation of customer demand.” Goodman said the “vast, vast majority” of the usage on the Rogers networks is download traffic. Nicolas Poitras, vice-president of marketing for Bell's residential services, said its fibre-to-the-node technology allows the company to offer higher upload speeds because its technology allows it to dedicate a sepearate channel for uploads. "Our approach is to deploy fibre to the home every time we deploy network moving forward," he said. Bell Fibe has a limited reach, mostly in Ontario and Quebec. Poitras said that the service, which includes both fibre-to-the-home connections and fibre-to-the-node connections, is available to 4.3 million households. Bell said in a Feb. 6 financial filing that it expects to have Fibe access to five million households by the end of 2014. Poitras said company's fibre-to-the-home networks have symmetrical connections, offering the same speeds for upload and download connections. “How consumers use the web has changed; it's increasingly a two-way thing,” he said. “We realized that consumers did not realize the need or understand how there is both an upload and download speed. People didn't understand the difference or how increasingly important the upload speed is.” Yet Canada’s upload speeds still lag the United States, among dozens of other countries. If the upload speed test results from Ookla are broken down by province and territory. Quebec, where Quebecor Inc.-owned Videotron provides its own wireline network, and three of the Maritime provinces, where Eastlink provides Internet access over its own high-speed network, score above the Canadian average of 7.6 Mbps. Ontario, where Rogers and Bell dominate the network infrastructure, has an average upload speed of 4.72 Mbps. If Ontario was ranked in the world table, it would be in 64th place, slower than 63rd-ranked Portugal. British Columbia, with an average upload speed of 3.91 Mbps, is just a hair slower than the country of Ghana, which would put it at 75th in the world. Manitoba, where Manitoba Telecom Services Inc. provides fibre Internet access to 20 communities, is the slowest province in Canada. It has an average upload speed of 2.42 Mbps, which would rank it just above Israel for 113th-fastest in the world. For comparison, the top upload speeds in the world are available to users in Hong Kong, at 59.85 Mbps, Singapore, at 47 Mbps and South Korea at 44.17 Mbps, according to Ookla. Ookla compiles data from billions of Internet speed tests conducted by households, businesses, schools and other institutions using Speedtest.net and Pingtest.net. The global data was collected from millions of Speedtest.net tests during the last 30 days. “The big guys, to date, have been concentrating on download speeds rather than upload,” said Tom Copeland, chair of the Canadian Association of Internet Providers, an industry group for smaller ISPs. “The problem we have is that the big guys aren't motivated, for whatever reason, to offer higher upload speeds, whether that's to businesses or residential.” Copeland said the big incumbents have no obligation to let the wholesale providers who use their network offer anything other than what they offer at retail. “A lot of these speeds, they're arbitrary,” he said. “The folks who control the pipes have decided that's what's best for their networks, their shareholders, and their market.” Pascal Tellier, chief information officer at Ontario-based wholesale ISP TekSavvy Solutions Inc., said his company has limited freedom in controlling the speeds on its network. The company leases space from Cogeco Cable Inc. and Rogers to provide its cable Internet services. “To a certain extent, we are limited by their infrastructure with what we can offer,” he said. Tellier said his company has much more flexibility to provide different options on its wholesale DSL service because it controls the authentication and more of the network communications. Cable infrastructure, though, has become much more robust and in many cases faster than DSL, he said. “Cable really won the war in terms of download speed,” he said. As cloud services such as the file storage provider DropBox, the voice-over-IP provider Skype and the streaming service Twitch.tv become more popular, Copeland said customers will need to convince the big incumbents that upload speed is a priority. “Most of us are downloaders,” he said. “Applications and what the consumer and developers are doing with the content is what's driving the access portion of the business, not the other way around.” In November, the CRTC announced it would begin a “national broadband measurement project” in the spring of 2014. The telecom regulator said in a 2011 decision that it expects all Canadians to have access to broadband download speeds of 5 Mbps and upload speeds of 1 Mbps by 2015. — With reporting by Peter Henderson at phenderson@thewirereport.ca and editing by Derek Abma at dabma@thewirereport.ca

Canada falls short in broadband upload speed ranking

News | February 26, 2014

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