Toronto Hydro Telecom, Toronto’s city-owned telco, reports bi-directional speeds on its One Zone network were independently clocked at an impressive 5 Mbps. This could up the ante for municipal expectations.As a journalist, I was taught to always be a bit suspicious of superlatives. Anything claiming to be the “best” or the “only” in a competitive marketplace is bound to get an argument. But the speeds reported in a recent press release from Toronto Hydro Telecom, Toronto’s city-owned telco, claiming to make their One Zone network the “fastest” in North America did capture my attention.
The company reported that independent performance tests conducted in December by Novarum Inc., consistently delivered Internet upload and download rates at a blistering 5 Mbps, far surpassing the performance of all other tested networks including Wireless Philadelphia, a citywide Wi-Fi initiative currently still under construction, and Google’s Wi-Fi network in Mountain View, California.
Bi-directional speeds of 5 Mbps is bound to raise the bar on current and future municipal wireless projects where, so far, 1.5 Mbps tops the expectations specified in contracts.
Toronto’s six-square-kilometer, One Zone, the release claims, is “the largest ubiquitous Wi-Fi zone of its kind in Canada” (another superlative–but true, to the best of my knowledge). The One Zone network, which officially launches on March 7, is uses technology in Siemens’ Mesh@vantage MR product line, including broadband wireless mesh technology from BelAir Networks.
The nice thing about new standards is that even newer ones are always on the horizon. I’m curious to hear from companies about technologies in the pipeline that push the envelope.
to read the press release.
Under what conditions was the speed measured? If only one test user was on the network, the measured speed will hardly represent what regular users will experience once the network is loaded with users.