First gigabit internet town in Canada

8,500 residents in a rural Alberta community (Olds, Alberta) will get gigabit internet for as little as $57 a month, thanks to a project by the town’s non-profit economic development foundation.

The board of O-Net gave approval for residents to get access to a full gigabit (or 1,000 megabits) per second of bandwidth for the same price that they currently pay for a guaranteed download speed of 100 megabits per second — $57 to $90 a month, depending on whether they have bundled their internet with TV and phone service.

A gigabit of bandwidth is considerably higher than the high-speed 175 to 250 megabits per second typically offered by fibre internet packages in big Canadian cities from internet providers such as Bell, Rogers or Shaw, typically for $115 to $226 per month. And it’s blazingly fast compared to the average Canadian internet download speed of just 16.6 megabits per second for an average of about $54 a month, according to a recent report from internet metrics company Ookla.

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