Home internet speeds nearly doubled year-over-year: CRTC

The average Canadian home internet speed soared to 126 Mbps in 2018, a 88.9 per cent increase on 2017’s average speed of 66.7 Mbps, according to the CRTC’s Communications Monitoring Report. The rise in home internet speeds comes as more households connect to the internet, and wholesale-based internet service providers and small facilities-based ISPs grab a bigger share of revenues, according to the internet section of the annual report, released Monday. Average residential download speeds had also increased the previous year, going up by 61 per cent in 2017. They were six times faster in 2018 than the average speed of 20.7 Mbps in 2014. In the report, the CRTC attributed the rise to the rapid growth in subscriptions of 100 Mbps or faster, which increased from 2.6 per cent of households in 2014 to 33.1 per cent in 2018. Less than a third of household subscriptions in 2018 were for speeds of less than 16 Mbps. Canadians with connections of 256 kbps or faster used 209.5 MBs of data on average each month in 2018, a rise of 25.3 per cent. Within that number, average data uploads increased by 25 per cent on the previous year, rising to an average of 16.7 GBs each month per household. At the same time, Canadians were paying less in overage charges, as nearly half of households opted for unlimited options. In 2018, 47.5 per cent of Canadians had unlimited data, up from 36.7 per cent a year earlier, the CRTC said. ISPs collected about $76 million in overage charges in 2018, down from $94 million in 2017, while businesses paid $3.5 million in overage fees. Just 2.3 per cent of households went over their data caps in 2018, a 1.3 per cent reduction on 2017’s figures. A 3.5 per cent increase in internet subscriptions means 88.8 per cent of households had home internet connections as of the end of 2018. Almost 86 per cent of households had access to the CRTC’s basic service requirements of 50 Mbps download speed and 10 Mbps upload speed, but only 29 per cent of households had opted in to unlimited data plans at those speeds. The fixed internet sector generated $11.8 billion of revenue for internet service providers in 2018, a growth of 7.3 per cent, which is lower than the average annual growth of 8.7 per cent between 2014 and 2018. Meanwhile, the revenue share of the five biggest internet servicers providers -- BCE Inc., Rogers Communications Inc., Shaw Communications Inc., Telus Corp. and Quebecor Inc.’s Videotron - dropped by 1.6 per cent to 71.7 per cent as independent providers continued to grow. Wholesale-based ISP’s revenue share grew to 6.8 per cent, up from 5.4 per cent, while smaller facilities-based providers’ rose to 6.9 per cent of the revenue share, a 2.8 per cent increase. Those other facilities-based providers had the highest average revenue per user, at $81.09 per month, while wholesale-based ISP’s had the lowest at $47.60 a month. The release of the data comes two months after Chris Seidl, the CRTC’s executive director of telecom, told the Rural and Remote Broadband Conference in North Bay, Ont. that the Atlantic provinces and the Prairies lagged behind the rest of the country in achieving the regulator’s speed targets. Just 40.8 per cent of rural residences met the targets, while 97.7 per cent of urban residences did. — With reporting by Adam Langenberg and editing by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca

Home internet speeds nearly doubled year-over-year: CRTC

News | January 6, 2020

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Home internet speeds nearly doubled year-over-year: CRTC

News | January 6, 2020

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