Even with the ambitious rollout of Wireless Internet in many rural areas, there are some farms and ranches that are so remote that the cost of providing wireless service becomes prohibitive even for the wireless provider. I am a farmer and part time dealer for the only Canadian Satellite Internet Provider in Canada. It is unfortunate that politics and self interest have blinded some wireless providers from including the option of a satellite connection to those farms and ranches who will cost them more to service than they would ever recover with a wireless connection. Only a Socialist would dream of being able to cover the far north and remote areas in the east and west of Alberta on principle while ignoring the exorbitant costs associated with that. Satellite technology is very expensive but the dishes have been reduced in size to much smaller, with the introduction of KA band (Telsat Canada) service. Unfortunately that service is not available in Alberta any longer, because of poor planning and what I call the Trana sic (Toronto) syndrome, Alberta was assigned only about half of the bandwidth than was sold, the system became bogged down and speeds became unacceptable, especially for our backbone, the Oil and Gas industry. It has been replaced by a Hughesnet (American) system, while Telsat refuses to supply more bandwidth on its newly launched satellite to Alberta. It is used only for service in Ontario and Quebec! However for home use Satellite Internet is comfortable, although not lightning fast. Typical speeds for about $50 per month are in the range of 4-500kbps download and 70-120 kbps upload. For another $10 per month they will double the download speed, making it a very comfortable surfing tool for the average family. By the way, these services were Unlimited usage at one time. Now because of movie and music downloads the provider has limited it to 200-500mB per day, before the Fair Access Policy kicks in and cuts the speed in half. Satellite Internet has been treated as the orphan of Internet service provision in Canada mainly because there are not huge dollars to be made by ISP's as in wireless. The media have not done their job at all in informing their customers of the availability of this technology and its usefulness, because they are buttonholed by Wireless ISP's. I hope that this has helped to clarify some things about Satellite Internet. It is not lightening fast,cheap,or competitive with wireless, but if all that you can get is DIALUP it is a wonderful alternative.

from home,in a small town (Didsbury) using a laptop and Telus ADSL download: 2.1 Mbps Upload: 487kbps Ping: 149 ms

Download 8.7 mbp upload 2.1 mps ping 247 ms

There are many factors that contribute to the latency of speed tests across the Internet. The SuperNet would only contribute latency from the user's physical location to where they connect to their Internet service provider's network(likely Edmonton or Calgary). From that location the most important factors would be the Internet Service Provider's peer arrangements and on who's network the speed test's server is located on. We need to be very careful judging a the service provider's service based on a test to a single speed test server as a provider may not have the optimal peer arrangement to reach that specific server, but they may have much better capability to a different server. Other factors that may contribute as well are time of day of the test and how the service provider provisions their network