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South Western Integrated Fibre Technology, that is the subject of this Blog post, (and sorry, but no we are not the official site for the SWIFT project). WRS Web Solutions Inc. is not as of yet involved in the SWIFT project, though we certainly are interested and are seeking information and want to explore opportunities. All that 'business stuff' aside, the scale and scope of SWIFT is very ambitious, and quite literally breath taking. Not since the days of Teledon (and I don't expect anyone reading this would remember Teledon from the 1970's), has any level of government in Canada dreamt on this scale (excluding military IT projects - but best we don't write Blog posts about those). This makes the South Western Integrated Fibre Technology Project or SWIFT for short, a truly worthy topic for a Blog such as this to talk about! SWIFT has the potential to completely alter the face of the high speed internet marketplace in South Western Ontario!
If you are not familiar with SWIFT, the basic concept is that a group of counties got together to try and get a project going to put fibre (spelt Fibre in Canada and Fiber in the USA) internet in place for their communities, ideally with some degree of government funding, etc, especially for those areas which do not already have cable high speed internet / broadband / or other forms of high speed internet. The difference between Fibre internet and cable internet is huge. Fibe is 'glass' based and used 'light'. Cable TV type of cable is copper/metal and uses electrical signals. Leaving all the complex stuff out of the explanation, fibre is much faster, and gives a better quality signal, and can carry much more. If the cable companies were laying cable TV today for the first time, they would be laying fibre not cable. In fact the have already begin to make the switch, in at least some new areas where they are laying new wires to new homes under construction.
So, let's recap. There is multi-government led project called SWIFT. It plans to put a modern fibre network in place across most of South Western Ontario. The Federal Government and the Province are supportive of SWIFT. There either has or will be some level of private company involvement. WRS Web Solutions Inc. is not yet involved in SWIFT, but is taking an interest, as we would like to also offer high speed internet services over SWIFT in the future. We believe in competition, the more the merrier! As it stands right now we are only offering our services to homes, businesses, and organizations in Ontario over the Ontario cable lines of Rogers and Cogeco, see our home page for a list of places in our High Speed Internet Service Area.
July 2016 saw a flood of press releases and statements by various governments about SWIFT, and if I am not mistaken some of them have even included hard coin! Projects love moral support and praise, but they like it even better when a cheque is included! Money always comes in handy when you need to buy things like fibre cable, and such, especially if the amount of the cheque is $180 million bucks! Perhaps the future will even hold additional funding. We are certainly going to watch and see how all of this unfolds. There is even a SWIFT Newsletter you can subscribe to, we did. Since that time, SWIFT continues to progress.
I hope you enjoyed this (unofficial) Blog post on the SWIFT Project. Please remember this is not the official SWIFT website, but there is a link to that below near the bottom of the page, just in case you were looking for it. If you wish to read more of our Blog posts there is a link on the top of the page to the Blog main page. Let's all hope SWIFT is a huge success, whether WRS Web Solutions Inc. gets access to the future SWIFT fibre network so as to offer our services or not. We would certainly like to be involved in a positive way.