Bell said fibre is coming to my neighbourhood soon, let’s see what happens

I’m moving to a new place in downtown Toronto, and sadly, my new apartment is using an older copper wire connection, so I can’t get very good internet speeds. Technically, it’s still high-speed, according to the government, since it’s 50mbps down and 10 Mbps up, but as someone who uses a lot of internet, I’m not sure that’s going to cut it.

From Bell, I can get a maximum of 50Mbps for $65 per month, and Rogers says that it can do up to 1.5Gbps for $100, which is better. However, the Rogers rep mentioned that a lot of people use traditional TV services, which might limit the upload/download speeds. I’m not sure if it’s worth it to pay for 1.5Gbps down if it only comes with 50Mbps upload speeds. And these speeds are inconsistent due to how many people are watching TV on the broadband line.

What Bell sold me on was that they promised that fibre was rolling out to the new neighbourhood (which I should mention is a five-minute walk from my current house, which has fibre) and would be installed by the middle of the summer, allowing me to upgrade back to modern gigabit speeds.

On average, I use 3TB of data monthly, split 70 per cent on downloads and 30 per cent on uploads. This is a lot of media streaming and downloading, plus some gaming and sometimes video work, which is why I want better upload speeds. I could comfortably live with Bell’s 300Mbps package, but that usually costs around $100, which is a similar price to fibre speeds.

While I can still use this total amount on my new 50Mbps plan, it’s going to slow things down considerably. Since I’ll need to split that with my partner, that’s more like 25Mbps per person, which is the bare minimum recommended to use Apple TV+ in 4K. This isn’t something everyone uses, but it’s what I’d consider good 4K video streaming. Netflix’s recommendation of 15Mbps seems better, but to me, that streamer’s 4K looks heavily compressed and desaturated.

However, even though they convinced me on the phone, I’m skeptical about whether it will happen this summer. So, I’m writing this story to keep track of the updates and see if Bell’s sales are honest. I’ll keep calling once I move and see what happens, and I’ll update this story with my findings.

Bell’s sales also promised me that it would grandfather me into my existing 1.5Gbps price of $96 once I move, but I’m also skeptical that it will be held up once/if fibre does come to my new house.

It’s hard to tell what will happen with Bell. The service provider announced on February 10 this year that it would be scaling back its investments into network infrastructure because it didn’t want to share its infrastructure with Telus and other big carriers. In the same report from February, Bell’s CEO said it would stop its investments in fibre rollout to 8.3 million homes.

That being said, Bell has made this kind of move before in retaliation to CRTC mandates it doesn’t agree to, and usually, it continues investing in its networks again after a bit of a wait. A month later, in March, it said that it was rolling out 8Gbps fibre in some parts of Ontario and Quebec, so it’s hard to tell how much the company scaled back.