Montreal is under curfew: at eight o'clock, the streets empty. Many workers spend their days on Zoom, and a good half of the people around us spend their evenings browsing listings for houses two hours outside the city: lake frontage, a barn, a woodstove.
Almost none of those listings mention the internet. Yet for anyone who plans to keep their job, it is the most important piece of information, and it is missing.
We spent most of the last ten years in Thailand and Indonesia, often on small islands, where no one takes a connection for granted. That experience calls for caution in the face of the current rush to the country. Leaving the city is an excellent decision, provided it is made with full knowledge of the facts.
What internet options are available in rural Canada?
The CRTC declared broadband a basic service in 2016 and set a target of 50 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload for every household. Much of rural Canada is still far from it. The CRTC's broadband internet page presents the official picture. It is useful for comparing a provider's offer against the established target.
Funding has been announced, at least on paper. Ottawa opened the Universal Broadband Fund last fall, and Quebec states that every household will be connected shortly. These commitments are positive. However, for a house purchase this spring, a funding announcement does not guarantee a cable running past the property.
In practice, a handful of options are available, and they differ considerably.
DSL over the existing phone line
This is often the service already in place. Speed depends on the distance to the telephone company's equipment, and in the country that distance is usually great. Download may be sufficient for email and basic browsing, but upload is often very low.
Fixed wireless
An antenna on the roof is aimed at a tower. With a clear line of sight, service can be satisfactory. However, a hill or a row of maples that leafs out in May degrades the signal. Trees are the most common complaint: a subscription taken out in March can prove disappointing by June.
Cellular
An LTE modem, or a phone used as a hotspot, can provide surprisingly good service in some locations and be unusable a kilometre down the road. In addition, given Canadian data prices, running an entire household this way quickly becomes expensive.
Satellite, and the Starlink beta
Traditional geostationary satellite services have an inherent delay, since the signal must travel to a very high altitude and back. Video calls on them are difficult. Starlink is attracting a great deal of interest this winter. Canadians can now sign up for the beta: $649 for the dish and $129 a month. Residents on remote back roads, limited to DSL for years, are posting speed tests comparable to an urban connection.
It is, however, a beta, with dropouts, and its performance as the number of users grows remains unknown. If the service continues to perform well, it will change what "too far out" means, and it is worth considering before ruling out a property.
What speed do you need for video calls?
Upload speed is what matters. Download speed is the figure everyone quotes and providers print in large letters, but for remote work it is not the first number to examine.
During a video call, you are transmitting your image and your voice. When you save a large file to the cloud, or when your laptop backs itself up at night, you are also transmitting data. A connection with 25 down and 1 up will stream Netflix without difficulty but make your voice sound robotic in every meeting.
As a rough guide, based on our experience and with no scientific claim: with upload of about 5 Mbps and one person on the line, video works most of the time. If your partner is also on calls all day, or the children are attending school online, considerably more is needed.
Latency matters as well. An unstable connection is less suitable for calls than a slower but consistent one. Run several tests at different times of day before relying on a single result.
How can you check connection quality before buying?
Test on site rather than relying on a coverage map. These maps are produced by providers seeking to sell a service, or by governments summarizing data supplied by those providers. In both cases, they are optimistic.
Here are the steps we recommend:
- Visit the house with your laptop and your phone. Run a speed test on every carrier signal you can receive, in the room where you will actually work, not in the driveway.
- Ask the seller for a recent internet bill. It shows the provider and plan actually used, not those the listing implies.
- Speak with the neighbours. They can tell you what stops working during a storm and how long service took to return during the last outage.
- If you plan to rely on satellite, check the view of the sky: does the property have a good open area, or is it set in a hollow surrounded by tall pines?
None of these steps is technical. It is simply a matter of verifying rather than assuming, when your income depends on it.
Should you plan a backup internet connection?
Yes, it is part of the requirements of remote work. Experience in Bali demonstrates this quickly: a power outage takes the router down with it, foundation work cuts a line, or the provider has an outage and its support line offers only a recording.
Rural Quebec is not Bali, but a freezing rain storm produces exactly the same effects. A fallback does not need to be complex: a phone plan with enough data to share the connection for a day or two, a small UPS so the modem rides out a brief power interruption, and knowing the nearest library or café with Wi-Fi, along with when it will reopen after the lockdown.
If you run a small business in the regions, add one more measure: keep your important files in the cloud, synced, so you can resume work on another computer elsewhere if your line goes down. This recommendation is simple, but effective.
How does slow internet hurt rural businesses?
It hurts them from both ends, an aspect rarely discussed. New arrivals from Montreal are not the only ones affected by a slow connection: businesses already established in the regions feel the effects every day.
A gîte or an outfitter on weak DSL has difficulty uploading quality photos, answering booking emails quickly or keeping its website up to date. Their customers often have a weak signal too, for example in a trailhead parking lot with one bar of reception, trying to load a page. A heavy site with very large images and autoplay video simply does not display for them.
Small businesses in the regions therefore need the opposite of what many agencies build: light pages, compressed photos, the phone number and opening hours at the top of the page, and solid local SEO so the listing appears in a Google search without effort on the user's part.
Based on observed trends, many of the people moving to the regions this year will stay, even after the curfew lifts and offices reopen. That means more customers in the country, on the same slow connections.
Before committing to a property, however appealing the view, run a speed test in the kitchen.