Xbox Series S refresh

[EricHiggin]

scrapking said:

EricHiggin said:

In Canada, in general:

If you live in or close to a large city your internet will be decent if not great.

If you live in or close to a small to medium sized city, your internet will be so so.

If you live in a rural area, a town, even a large town, your internet will be terrible.

There are exceptions, both positive and negative, but those are rare. Best part is, instead of trying to bring everyone with terrible or so so internet up to speed, the com giants just keep upgrading the large cities. Locally here, near a very small town, we just got upgraded from 5mbps DSL to 25mbps max wireless with 250GB data cap recently. Meanwhile the GTA was already far ahead of that a decade ago and is getting upgraded to unlimited gigabit.

It won't get much better where the internet is terrible and maybe so so either, because StarLink is going to take them all anyway eventually, so the big coms very likely won't bother much going forward. Problem with StarLink is it's going to take a while yet for broad coverage, plus there are still cold, ice, and snow issues, and that's a problem for 6 months in Canada, especially for online gaming or streaming.

Fair enough, I gave an overly simplistic answer based on the fact that the majority of Canada's population lives in or near big cities these days.  And that also in BC and Alberta, Telus offers smart-hubs with huge data caps and reasonable prices (and decent latency) over their LTE network in the rural areas within their wireless coverage footprint.  But yes, the rural areas in the other provinces have it far rougher with Xplorenet, etc., from the sounds of it.

Ultimately, I agree with you that there are some people that won't have a good game streaming experience, and won't for a while yet.

Just figured I'd fill a little more in.

The entirety of rural Southern Ontario is supposed to be FTTH by 2040, which is a long way yet for some, but I worry a bit that because of StarLink, that program may get paused or cancelled. If StarLink can figure out the cold issues for the most part then it would probably be doable, but if that remains a problem, everyone who's a rural gamer would be out of luck. You'd have no choice but to wait and hope FTTH happened eventually or move to a city.