Small Toronto ISP to provide fibre link for Pan Am athletes

Athletes from across two continents competing in the 2015 Pan American Games in Toronto this summer will be able to connect with family and friends back home via high-speed fibre Internet connections provided by Beanfield Technologies Inc. The company, the official communications services supplier for the games, has a fibre network in downtown Toronto that links commercial and residential buildings all along the waterfront to the Internet at speeds of 100 Mbps and more. In June 2011, Beanfield won the contract for connecting the Waterfront Toronto development, including condominiums and commercial space that will be finished in 2021, as well as a series of buildings the will serve as the athletes’ village during the upcoming games. The company brands itself as Beanfield Metroconnect. "Our partnership with Beanfield Metroconnect means the 7,500 athletes coming to our games will enjoy super-fast connections in their home away from home,” Ian Troop, former director of the organizing committee for the games, said in a press release when the partnership was announced in 2013. "This means they can connect with friends, family and fans throughout the Americas at any time, keep up-to-date with their social media feeds and relax by downloading music or watching their favourite TV show. It'll make them feel more connected with their host city, as well as back home." The Pan Am Games take place in Toronto between July 10 and 26, while the Parapan Am Games are Aug. 7 to 14. Beanfield’s network is the result of more than 15 years of investment in fibre-optic infrastructure, beginning in the late 1990s with businesses, such as those involved in film production, that needed higher-than-normal network speeds. The waterfront contract was the catalyst for the company’s move into residential service, said CEO Dan Anderson. “We'd always shied away from because you need a significant volume before it's profitable,” Anderson said in a phone interview on Monday. “We never really had the critical mass to get us going, but the waterfront sort of catalyzed the whole thing.” The first residential building the company hooked up to its fibre network was Anderson’s own, in Liberty Village, in April 2013. “We wanted to cut our chops on some buildings before we dove into the Waterfront project,” he said. “It's been a learning experience but we got there." The company offers symmetrical connections — meaning download and upload speeds are the same — of 100, 250 or 500 Mbps, as well as home phone and television service delivered by a proprietary set-top box. “As more storage moves into the cloud, people's traffic patterns are shifting,” Anderson said. “People are pushing stuff out of their homes a lot more than they ever used to. That's a huge advantage with our service. And, of course, video is starting to go over the top, moving onto the Internet. Having a fast Internet connection where you can stream to your heart's content is great.” Residential customers are more price-conscious than business, Anderson said, and the young clientele who live in the downtown condos are much harder to reach with traditional advertising. Heather Burnett Gold, president of the U.S.-based Fiber to the Home Council Americas, said in a phone interview Monday that the residential market can be more “complicated” than the business market for fibre providers. “The residential market takes a lot more bandwidth because of video,” she said. “A small business isn't going to use that kind of bandwidth that the residential might.” Gold said that small companies have had success deploying small-scale fibre networks in localized areas, especially in urban centres. "That's a model that works," she said. “Especially in an urban area. In some of the smaller areas, you have to be realistic, and the economy wouldn't support more than one fibre build. But in some cities, you can even see two or three fibre providers, and that's good because it pushes everybody to do it.” Smaller providers, she added, often are more nimble than infrastructure-owning incumbents because they are free to deploy the latest technologies without having to maintain or upgrade existing networks. "They're less constrained by their historical investment," she said. "They can make the business case, because they don't necessarily have to replace old facilities." Gold said studies show consumers place a high value on high-speed Internet connections enabled by fibre. “Once those people live in a place with fibre to the home, they're not going to want to go back,” she said. “That we can tell you, definitely. The studies show it.” Vancouver-based Urban Communications Inc. and municipally owned O-Net in Olds, Alta., are also among some of the smaller organizations in Canada providing fibre-to-the-premise connections for ultra-fast Internet service. — With reporting by Peter Henderson at phenderson@thewirereport.ca and editing by Derek Abma at dabma@thewirereport.ca

Small Toronto ISP to provide fibre link for Pan Am athletes

News | April 20, 2015

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Small Toronto ISP to provide fibre link for Pan Am athletes

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