The Internet Speed in Canada
If you live in Canada, you can access the Internet through several methods depending on where you live and your budget. Some example methods of access are:
- Telephone line: Dial-up and DSL connections are two examples of using telephone lines to access the Internet
- Cable: This is probtoably the best method of accessing the Internet in Canada. A typical residential high speed Internet via cable could reach a download speed of 15 Mbps (Mega Bits Per Second) while telephone line Internet could rarely exceed 5 Mbps
- Satellite: It is an ideal method of access to the Internet for those remote areas where cable is not available.
- Other methods: Wireless Internet, and Wi-Fi connections are available in most common buildings such as restaurants and airports. You may also use mobile Internet for your laptop computer and access the Internet from virtually everywhere.
To the best of my knowledge, the Internet is present in all urban and rural areas and even in many remote locations of Canada. There are two methods to evaluate the speed of the Internet connection: download speed and upload speed. The speedtest.net is a popular website that publishes reports about the speed of Internet in different countries and locations. You may also test the speed of your Internet connection via this website.
According to speedtest.net, Canada with an average download speed of 6.86 Mbps sits at rank 38 among 183 different countries reported by the website. The top-ranked country is Republic of Korea with 22.79 Mbps and at the bottom sits Guyana with 0.42 Mbps. You might also like to know that the United States is ranked 29 with an average download speed of 8.01 Mbps.
When it comes to the upload speed, Canada is ranked 39 and shows an average speed of 1.17 Mbps. The United States is ranked 30 with an average upload speed of 1.84 Mbps.
Since the report could get updated at any time, I encourage you to take a look at the original report too [link].
While being among top 40 is not a very bad position, I hope we see significant improvement in Canadian Internet speed and services in the future.
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Al Parsai, LLM, MA, RCIC-IRB
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Adjunct Professor, Queen’s University Faculty of Law
Instructor, Ashton College, Immigration Consulting Program
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