Frustrated by buffering when you’re trying to stream something online or your TV being interrupted by another one in the house or only being able to record one or two programs at a time or slow downloads?
According to Brian Eltom, assistant vice president of Sasktel, who was the guest speaker at the Chamber of Commerce luncheon February 16, their new fibre network Infinet, scheduled to be extended to Yorkton this summer is going to fix all that.
The build will start with neighbourhoods serviced by overhead lines in April, he told the group of business people at the Ramada Thursday.
“Those first neighbourhoods will probably come on line in late June or early July,” he said.
Neighbourhoods with buried infrastructure will have to wait longer because the construction cannot start until the ground thaws and running fibre underground takes approximately twice as long as the aerial.
“It will probably be about February [2018] before everybody in the city can take advantage of all the new products and services,” Eltom estimated.
That only applies to residential customers or businesses in those residential areas because commercial areas and industrial parks will not be upgraded for at least another year or two.
Residential customers should be happy, though, even if they don’t do anything.
“The big benefit they’ll see is if they’re a high speed or broadband customer of ours, they will see automatically a doubling in their speeds for the same price,” he explained. “But we’ve found a lot of customers, especially busy households and small businesses, are needing more speed than they can get from us today so they’ll have package options at those higher ends that’ll fit their needs much better than they can today.”
Eltom noted other benefits related to Max TV will include extending the number of set top boxes available from four to seven; the ability to simultaneously record up to four programs; additional bundling options; and the addition of Netflix capability to the set top boxes.
Of course, fibre to the home will only provide speed advantages if the hardware inside the house can keep up. Eltom said that is covered in the plan.
“The new gateways that are coming with Infinet have a pretty good wifi signal that should be able to provide much higher speeds throughout the house,” he said. “And we do have wifi extenders that you can put at the other end of the home that can extend the strength of the wifi signal coming from the gateway. So, we’ve got a couple of options to try and make sure we can provide not only good coverage but higher speed performance that they’re expecting to get from the higher speed Infinet.”
