Bell Fibe and FTTH in works for this year

Bell today promised to revive the speed wars in Canada with a major deployment of fiber in key areas. The telecom giant says it plans a 3-year rollout of fiber to the home (FTTH) that will provide users download speeds of "at least" 100Mbps and upload speeds of 20Mbps. It will focus on the Quebec City area first as it depends less on below-ground networks but should expand in the second half of this year to include all new city and suburban housing in Ontario and Quebec.

Many other areas will get most of the speed benefit through fiber to the building, or FTTB, which switches to phone lines within an apartment or condominium. Its expansion has already started and should provide 60Mbps downstream. About 1,600 of the multi-unit buildings should have FTTB by the end of 2012.

In the interim, the company officially launched Fibe, a combination of fiber and VDSL2: the technique uses fiber to the local network node and VDSL2 to complete the link. It promises service between 6Mbps and 25Mbps downstream, competing more closely with faster cable access; however, bandwidth caps are still relatively low at a maximum 75GB per month.

Fibe is active today in Montreal and the greater Toronto area with rates hovering between $32 and $53 per month before taxes and fees. Other areas haven't been given a schedule, but Bell anticipates having doubled the number of homes covered by the end of 2010. It also plans to supply IPTV in sync with Fibe and is trialing the service today.

The expansions would make Bell's FTTH and FTTB services some of the fastest in North America, not just in Canada. Verizon currently caps off its FTTH-based service at 50Mbps, while cable providers like Comcast and Rogers currently top out at the same speeds for their DOCSIS 3.0 networks.

By Electronista Staff