Forum Discussion
High speed data in Canada
What exactly is "high speed"? I'm traveling in Canada (from US) and find 12 - 14 Mbps via cell from a hotel room on the 30th floor in downtown Vancouver and about the same using the hotel wifi. Neither are remotely close to my typical data speed via cell in small-town Eastern WA. 15GB/mo is a nice idea, but not at that rate. It's adequate for navigation but pretty sluggish for browsing.
DennisMullen wrote:
What exactly is "high speed"? I'm traveling in Canada (from US) and find 12 - 14 Mbps via cell from a hotel room on the 30th floor in downtown Vancouver and about the same using the hotel wifi. Neither are remotely close to my typical data speed via cell in small-town Eastern WA. 15GB/mo is a nice idea, but not at that rate. It's adequate for navigation but pretty sluggish for browsing.
Vancouver and most of British Columbia's speeds are around that. Infrastructure for Bell/Telus in BC and other parts of Canada are very neglected and well over capacity for mostly band/n66 coverage. Anywhere east of Quebec though is barely 5Mbit.
DennisMullen wrote:
What exactly is "high speed"? I'm traveling in Canada (from US) and find 12 - 14 Mbps via cell from a hotel room on the 30th floor in downtown Vancouver and about the same using the hotel wifi. Neither are remotely close to my typical data speed via cell in small-town Eastern WA. 15GB/mo is a nice idea, but not at that rate. It's adequate for navigation but pretty sluggish for browsing.
Vancouver and most of British Columbia's speeds are around that. Infrastructure for Bell/Telus in BC and other parts of Canada are very neglected and well over capacity for mostly band/n66 coverage. Anywhere east of Quebec though is barely 5Mbit.
I remember the days of 9600 (and even 2400) bps dial-up. To me, anything over 1 Mbps is "high speed".
I’ve had better than that on both T-MObile (Bell/Telus roaming 4G LTE) and AT&T (Rogers 5G roaming)
A couple years back, I hit +200Mbps on LTE in good areas of Northern Ontario, Eastern Ontario, Quebec and NB/NS
Rogers typically gave me 5G on AT&T and hit +300Mbps in NS.
It's possible that its more limited now. I'll check again in a couple months when I go back north of the border.
As a note: I’m on an older T-Mobile One plan, and only 5GB/month.
Also, high buildings are generally not a good place to run speed tests. Most cellular antennas point downward, at the ground. A few may be laid sideways aimed to cover tall buildings but these do not generally provide the best service. Also, some tall buildings may have a DAS but you don't know its capacity.
