Highspeed hangup

The trouble of moving from a city to a very, very small village is that you can no longer take high speed internet for granted.  Where there is a plethora of highspeed (DSL, Cable, Fibre Optic) choices in the highly-populated places, there is but a small handful of options in the boondocks. 

Now don't get me wrong, I love living in the boondocks. One could even say that I feel no shame, I'm proud of where I came from; I was born and raised in the boondocks. 


However, I've also come to love highspeed internet.

So, here are my choices:

1. Dial-up.  My parents cruise dial-up at a whopping 14.4kbps.  It is like watching paint dry, except more boring.  It takes half an hour to check their email, and they've literally never run a computer update.

2. There is actually free access to Satellite internet at my new place of residence; one of the perks of living above a coffee shop.  Satellite is incredibly expensive and not something I would ever recommend to anyone.  We get average download speeds of something like 500kbps.  Faster than dial-up; it's tolerable if all you want to do is check facebook over and over and over again.  (honestly, that's about all I do anyway...)  However, if you want to, say, stream video, watch youtube, download computer updates, sign up for NetFlix, or shop for a new game on a Wii, well... there's this thing called 'throttling' that kicks in after about 5 minutes and grinds your internet connection to a halt.  It's the provider's way of making sure that everyone gets equal and fair access to the satellite signal.  It sucks.  Mostly, this form of internet is tolerable because it's free to me.  If I had to pay for it, I would not be a happy customer.

3. Broadband internet is something the county has been funding in order to bring highspeed to the rural people of Southwestern Ontario.   If you're willing to pay $85/month, you can get really great speeds of up to 5mbps.  It's a good choice if you don't mind putting up a $700 tower/lightening rod on your roof.  Unfortunately, one company hired by the county to provide this service oversold the bandwidth, didn't invest enough into equipment to keep up with demand, and actually went bankrupt.  Is that something I actually want to invest $700 in?  Not really...

Which leads me to my last choice for highspeed in the boondocks:

4. The Sony Ericsson W35.  AKA the 'Rogers Rocket Hub', or the 'Bell Turbo Hub'.  The idea being that you take this little unit, plug it into an outlet, and it uses the local 3G cellular network to create a wifi hotspot in your home.  It's a great idea.  They promise speeds of up to 7.2mbps.  It costs as little as $35/month.  You can connect up to 15 things to the internet all at once.  [Internet sticks are currently boasting speeds of up to 21mbps but can only be attached to one thing at a time, and are significantly more expensive.]  The hub even has an option to add a phone (VoIP) for a reasonable $20/month - which would be great because we're currently working with just cellphones.

The BF and I decided that the Hub would be a viable option.  So, today on my lunch hour, I went to the local Rogers desk in the mall with the intentions of purchasing one of these units.  To my benefit, the sales guy was in his early 20's - so you know that he knows a thing or two about the system and how it works. 

Upon my request of a Rocket Hub, he immediately told me, (without even showing me a unit), that they are currently experiencing huge network problems and, during peak demand times, it is very unlikely I'd even be able to connect to the internet.  He said that he himself can rarely access the internet over his own personal Rogers cellphone between the hours of 8am and midnight.  He also said that that it is not just a Roger's problem, but an industry-wide problem.  Essentially, the popularity of accessing the internet through cellphones, smartphones, internet sticks, and hubs has created such a strain on the network that nothing is getting through.  Obviously it's a problem they're working on, but I bet it's not one they'll readily admit.

Would it be a surprise to know that I walked away today without a Hub?  Strange that I didn't want to shell out $150 and sign up for a 2 year contract at a minimum of $35/month for something that can't guarantee me internet access, eh?

So my question is, where is the CRTC in all of this?  Shouldn't they, (or someone, anyone), be governing the sale of these devices to ensure that demand doesn't outpace supply?  If I'm going to purchase a service, shouldn't the provider actually have to provide the service?  Shouldn't that be, like, law or something?  Or at the very least, good business practise.

For now, we'll just keep limping along with satellite internet.