Where you live in northern Ontario could determine internet speed: Report

If you happen to live in a northern Ontario city, there's a pretty good chance that your internet is faster than in most rural areas. 

That's one of the key findings to be gleaned from The Speed of Northern Ontario Broadband, a new report from Blue Sky Net, an organization in North Bay dedicated to facilitating the deployment of broadband technologies in rural northern communities. 

According to 4,330 speed tests performed in 101 Northern Ontario communities since 2015, the average download speed was just under 9 megabytes per second (Mbps) with an average upload speed of 5 Mbps.

The average internet speeds in urban communities are between 21.88 and 20.29 Mbps, but when when tests run from within the major urban communities were removed from the sample, the average speeds dropped to betweeen 7.2 and 7.3 Mbps.

Here are the top 10 overall download speeds, according to the report: 

Download speeds (Mbps)

• Dryden 47.4
• Sault Ste. Marie 35.5
• Timmins 29.2
• Kenora 29.1
• Carling 29.0
• Greater Sudbury 27.5
• Cobalt 21.4 
• Temiskaming Shores 21.0
• Muskoka Lakes 18.8
• Spanish 17.4

North Bay, Timmins, Greater Sudbury and Sault Ste. Marie also registered some of the fastest upload speeds in the north.

"Speed tests initiated from the seven communities that are designated as 'cities' on average, registered results that were over twice as fast as speed tests registered for all other communities," reads the report. "Although the connection between community population and Internet performance is known, the reasons for the relationship may not be quite so well known."

"Larger communities represent a better return on investment to ISPs to build networks, therefore more services are built, and more options exist to the consumer. Not only do cities tend more populated they also tend to be more dense, meaning there are more people (potential customers) per square kilometer. From an infrastructure perspective it is considerably more cost effective to run one kilometre of fibre optic cable to serve 100 customers than one kilometre of fibre to serve half a dozen."

The Speed of Northern Ontario Broadband report can be accessed in its entirety on the connectednorth.ca website, which also includes an interactive internet speed test map, high-speed availibility checker and an internet performance test that's available to the public.