Shaw to trial FTTH internet service
Shaw Communications announced today that it will trial Gigabit Internet service which is 10 times faster than Shaw’s High-Speed Nitro Internet service, which currently runs at 100 Mbps per second.
The company gave few details of the trial other than to say the service would be “delivered over Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) and will be able to support new and emerging Internet applications that require faster download speeds.”
Shaw also said it expects to launch the service in April, however, the company did not say where the Gigabit Internet service might be launched, what it might cost or how many customers would actually be able to subscribe to the FTTH service.
The Gigabit service will likely be offered to a limited number of newly built apartment buildings and condominiums in Western Canada which laid fibre optic cable to each unit when they were built.
Shaw says it expects to begin rolling out the service in April.
Shaw will not be the first Canadian company to offer FTTH internet service. By the end of 2010, Bell Aliant in Atlantic Canada says it will have invested $80 million to bring FTTH technology to 110,000 – or 35 per cent – of the homes and business in New Brunswick.
Discuss in Digital Home’s Canadian High Speed Internet forum.
According to an article in the Calgary Herald today (via the Edmonton Journal) the service is hardly being rolled out in April. Shaw is doing a trial in one Vancouver community in April and then one community in each of Calgary and Edmonton in August. From there they’ll decide on packaging, pricing, etc. It sounds like if there is a demand or their competitors start doing something that it wouldn’t take all that long to start offering this service. Personally, I can’t wait to see the price they’ll charge for this service.