Vianet connects in the south: Sudbury telecom makes inroads into Southern Ontario residential market.

AuthorMyers, Ella
PositionNEWS

When it comes to internet service providers playing the field in southern Ontario, "it's not just the big boys anymore."

At least, that's what Vianet's director of business development, Brian McCullagh, thinks. The Sudbury-based telecommunications company is aggressively expanding into southern Ontario, and bringing a mindset shaped by servicing Northern rural communities with them.

Their most recent project involves bringing fibre to the home (FTTH) service to a Whitchurch-Stouffville neighbourhood, in southern Ontario's York region.

A million-dollar estate in a beautifully forested, semi-rural area may sound idyllic, but how idyllic is it when you can't get internet fast enough to stream Netflix? Or, if you manage to get quality internet, it costs you upwards of $600 a month? That's the situation in which residents of the newly developed neighbourhood found themselves in 2013.

"People were using hubs and sticks, so the download and upload of information was extremely expensive," said Whitchurch-Stouffville Counc. Ken Ferdinands. They were too close to existing towers to qualify for federal, rural broadband funding, but that funding didn't take into account the natural environment that made the properties so appealing in the first place.

"The natural barrier of the trees was a tremendous barrier for the signal to penetrate, and we had natural barriers as well as technological barriers we were trying to overcome," said Ferdinands.

Larger companies like Bell offered some solutions, but they were rejected by residents as too cost-prohibitive, who despite dissatisfaction with the state of things were reluctant to invest in an entirely new technology.

Vianet happened to acquire the southern Ontario wireless internet service provider Zing Networks, right around the time Ferdinands was trying to find an internet solution for his constituents, and he found they were more open to negotiation than their competitors.

"We've built a line from Vaughan to Barrie," said Vianet's Luke Gasteiger, director of network engineering. "We wanted to branch out to small pockets of homes that can't get anything."

After negotiations with the councillor and residents, Vianet agreed to install the FTTH if they fulfilled a threshold of homes to sign up to each pay a $2,500 initial cost to cover approximately half of the project cost. Ferdinands enlisted the help of eager residents, like Michael Cleverdon, to advocate for installation of FTTH in the neighbourhood.

"It...

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