I noticed something new on Bell Canada’s website today. They have something called “Fibe”. Now this makes you think that it’s like Verizon FiOS where they are running fiber to the home. It’s not. It’s fiber to the node, meaning the fiber is terminated in a street cabinet up to several kilometers away from the your home, with the final connection being copper. Which means that this is really VDSL 2+. But it’s actually worse than that. The speeds are 6/1Mbps, 12/1Mbps, 18/1 Mbps and 25/7 Mbps depending on where you live. But the caps are abysmal at 25, 50, 75 and 75 GB for each tier.
Here’s the bottom line. It’s a game of semantics. They want to get the brownie points of having fiber without actually having fiber to the home. They’re at best trying to muddy the waters so that customers will get their Internet services from them. As a result consumers end up losing. What I hope happens is that cable companies show consumers how disingenuous this is and put Bell Canada in it’s place.
Rogers, are you paying attention?
UPDATE: Someone from Bell is paying attention. Besides logging a bunch of BCE IP addresses (nothing new there, Bell has been looking at this blog but not saying anything for as long as this blog has been around) that looked at this story, someone from Bell actually phoned my office number and didn’t leave a message. But since I have call display, I was able to trace the number back to a Bell office. Google suggests that it’s the one at the DVP and Wynford Drive in Toronto. Hmmm…. Perhaps I hit too close to home with this post? Oh yeah, calling the number back was a useless exercise as there was no voice mail (or more likely it is a line assigned to a PBX). Perhaps whomever was calling would drop me an e-mail and tell me why they’re calling me (though I won’t be surprised if they don’t).