Is high speed internet service available where I live or where I am moving to?
WRS Web Solutions Inc. offers cable high speed internet in Ontario over four different cable networks for the ‘last mile’ to the customer home and businesses. (The actual connection to the internet happens over a different connection from Rogers, Shaw, Videotron, and Cogeco, but we share their local wiring, and to some extent their traffic management controls.) We are a separate company from Rogers, Videotron, Shaw, and Cogeco. We pay to use their cable TV line to deliver our high speed internet.
So, we have the use of these three cable TV networks, to allow us wired access to most homes in Ontario. (In addition we now have access to the Bell phone lines to be able to offer DSL high speed internet.)
Now here is the hard part. These two cable companies did not lay cable TV wire to every home, rather they concentrated on the urban areas, Towns, Cities etc, and tended not to wire up farms, acreages, and cottages, likely as it takes a lot of cable and costs a lot of money to wire up rural customers, so in most case the rural address did not get cable TV service. Let us look at some common scenarios below:
1. So the first rule of thumb, is that if you live in an Ontario home where you have cable TV service from Rogers, Shaw, or Coegco then yes we should be able to provide our cable high speed internet services. (In the case of Rogers if the line from the road to the home is FTTH, we are not permitted us of the line. Also, some parts of the Cogeco cable TV network are not 'internet capable'.)
2. If you (or someone who lived there before you) in that Ontario home had cable TV from Rogers, Shaw, or Cogeco, then yes we should be able to provide our cable high speed internet services.
3. If your home is in an Ontario subdivision that you know is wired for cable TV, then yes we should be able to provide our cable high speed internet services, as we usually can arrange to have the cable line installed (run in from the road) or activated if is already existing.
4. If you have tried to get cable high speed internet from your local cable company (Rogers, Shaw, or Cogeco) and they say your address is not serviceable, then we would NOT be able to provide services either, as we use those very same cable TV lines that they do. We might be able to provide internet service over a phone line (DSL).
5. If you do order and pay for services from us, then we find out that the address is not serviceable, we would refund your money. (If you have ordered a modem and it has not shipped, we would cancel the modem order and refund your money for the modem. If the modem has shipped, and you do not accept delivery of it, we would refund your money for the modem when we get it back. If you have already received it, we can discuss how you are to send it back to us, i.e. usually nice and neat and tidy in the original packaging (so we can put it back into stock), to an address we will provide. We are really good about refunds.)
6. If you are not sure if your home is servicable by cable wires, then a quick way to find out is to check the cable company’s website, with their postal code checker. If they say it is serviceable then it should be OK to place an order with us. If they say it is not serviceable then likely we can’t provide service either. As a note, the Rogers, Shaw, and Cogeco cable networks generally speaking do not overlap. It is just a matter of asking your neighbours which one services your area, then you know which website to check. We were not able to place a Postal Code lookup box on our website as nobody will let us have the data to be able to use with such a lookup box. We have instead placed a list of place names on the home page of our website, which is our best understanding of what places are serviceable by which networks, but there will always be exceptions in that there will always be some addresses which will end up not being serviceable but we won’t know until we process the order (after payment), in which case we will let you know and do a refund. Unfortunately this is just the nature of the business.
7. Another new wrinkle is that the phone and cable companies are now laying a new kind of wire, called 'fibre' (pronounced fiber, but in Canada it is spelt fibre). The CRTC has ruled that companies like us are to get access to the fibre networks as well as the cable TV networks, but that has not happened yet. (The Cable companies are reluctant to ‘share’ just yet. Fibre is a big investment for them, and despite the fact we pay for access, as we use it, they don’t like any more competition that they have to have.) So you could end up in a new neighbourhood with only fibre service from the cable companies, and we would not know until we process the order and they tell us (Oops sorry no cable TV lines there.) It has happened before, and we simply tell you and do a refund. (We would make the process much cleaner and more exact by providing an address lookup box on our website, but we are unable to obtain the data, and the CRTC can’t help us either, so we have tried, believe me we have tried extremely hard!)
If after reading the above you need us to 'check' or 'confirm' the serviceability of your address or postal code, please open a Help Desk Ticket (Contact Us) and ask. We will do a quick 'check' using much the same postal code lookup box as is on the cable company websites (which you can do even faster yourself) and reply. If you want a 'confirmation', then we have to contact either cable company and ask them, and often that takes a day or two to get a reply back from them to us and then to you. So please be clear if you want a 'check' or a 'confirmation' when asking. Back to Home page.
So, most of the above referred to cable high speed internet, using cable TV type lines. If that did help you, you can try our phone line based DSL high speed internet, which we deliver over the bell phone lines in Ontario.
