Asked how O-NET's milestone decision to offer one gigabit of bandwidth will benefit the non-profit Internet service provider's customers, Nathan Kusiek put it this way.
Asked how O-NET's milestone decision to offer one gigabit of bandwidth will benefit the non-profit Internet service provider's customers, Nathan Kusiek put it this way.
"You have the speed. We've given you a super fast car on a really nicely paved highway now and you don't have to worry about speed limits."
Kusiek, the service provider's sales and marketing manager, said O-NET's management decided on July 18 to increase the service's maximum bandwidth from 100 megabits to 1,000 megabits, or one gigabit.
The increase, he added, puts Olds ahead of any other city and town in Canada for downloading and uploading speeds.
"We're the first community in Canada to put fibre directly to someone's house and with that fibre optic connection, we're the only ones that can actually deliver that speed," Kusiek said.
O-NET is the service provider and marketing brand for Olds Fibre Ltd., a company owned by the Olds Institute for Community and Regional Development, and is the first community-owned, community-wide fibre-optic network in the country.
Currently, the service provider has three Internet connection speed offers—one for 10 megabits per second (Mbps) for downloading by one megabit for uploading at a cost of $39.98, one for 20 Mbps for downloading by two Mbps for uploading at a cost of $64.98 and 100 Mbps for downloading by five Mbps for uploading at a cost of $90 if purchased outside a bundle package.
If the maximum bandwidth offer is purchased within a bundle package with television and phone, it costs $57.
Once the new one-gigabit service kicks in, which should happen in about a week, Kusiek said, all O-NET residential customers will automatically get upgraded to faster bandwidth in all three categories, with the maximum speed jumping from 100 Mbps to one gigabit per second, all at no extra cost.
And new customers can sign up for one-Gbps service for $57 in a bundle or $90 for just Internet for a limited time.
All of the infrastructure for the bandwidth increase is in place, he added, and making the change won't take long at all.
"It's essentially just someone having to type some things into a keyboard at our central office."
Kusiek said the decision to increase bandwidth for customers boils down to a "marketing decision."
"We said, 'Well let's take any question that our product is not superior to the other guys out of the equation and let people have no reason to not switch,'" he said.
People with the one-gigabit bandwidth will see huge differences even when just clicking through web pages while the increased uploading speed will help customers the most "because it will communicate back out to the other side of the Internet as fast as possible," Kusiek said.
For example, he said, simply adding an attachment to an email would happen much more quickly.
At the one-gigabit service level, a file of 125 megabytes would download in as fast as one second.
Providing such fast Internet speeds has given Olds national and international attention since few other communities— in nearly all cases large cities— have the fibre-optic infrastructure necessary to provide one-gigabit bandwidth.
Shaw Communications offers one-gigabit Internet service in Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver while Google Fiber offers a similar service in Kansas City with plans to introduce the service in Austin, Texas, and possibly Provo, Utah.
O-NET's Internet speeds are also well ahead of broadband speed targets recently introduced by the federal government.
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission has set a broadband target speed of five Mbps for downloads and one Mbps for uploads for all Canadians to be in place by 2015.
After installing a fibre feeder network and distribution lines across Olds in the past four years, O-NET is currently working to complete hookups to five remaining service areas across the community out of a total of 11.
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