Stouffville resident says $5K is too much to connect high-speed internet to his home

Ward 1 Coun. Ken Ferdinands worked with residents to get Vianet high speed available in clusters in the rural area

Yorkregion.com
Feb. 4, 2022
Simon Martin

Good internet is a just stone’s throw away for Stouffville resident Ron Roberts. He lives on Vivian Sideroad and last year they ran fibre-optic cable down the road. The problem for Roberts is he thinks the hook-up was simply too expensive to justify. “They said it was going to cost me $5,000 to connect to my house,” he said. “That is an awful lot of money to shell out to service a fibre line.”

Roberts has lived in the area for 22 years and like many semi-rural residents he has struggled finding adequate service. Currently he is using a Rogers Wireless hub and says it can be unreliable. “It’s crashy as hell,” he said. “The problem is we are on the edge of the Oak Ridges Moraine and it is very easy to end up in a hollow,” he said.

Roberts wants a more reasonable hookup charge for residents.

Many other residents like Frank Van Veen have gladly forked over the hookup charge and don’t regret it. The install fee to hook into Vianet was $2,500 for him three and a half years ago. He said after paying the install fee you ending up saving a whole bunch of money plus you have high quality internet.

“It’s a better investment,” he said.

Van Veen is now paying less than he was before for internet that is much better. “We would never dream of using any of the streaming services before,” he said. “We didn’t subscribe to anything.”

Now Van Veen uses the internet without fear of data caps.

A big reason Vianet has service in many areas of rural Whitchurch-Stouffville is due to the work of Ward 1 Coun. Ken Ferdinands.

Back in 2012 he realized there was opportunity to provide fibre connection to a number of the population clusters near the Trail of the Woods subdivision around Kennedy Road and Aurora Road. Ferdinands said it would only be viable if a good majority of residents would subscribe and pay the hookup charge.

Ferdinands was knocking on doors trying to convince residents hooking into fibre was the way of the future. “A lot of people didn’t realize where the internet was going,” he said.

But eventually Ferdinands got enough buy-in from residents and Vianet came online in 2014 and has attempted to address other rural clusters in past years.

Ferdinands certainly has heard arguments that the hookup charge is too expensive, but thinks it is short-sighted. “If you want hydro you pay for it. I don’t know why people see this utility any different than hydro and gas,” he said.

Ferdinands said a lot of tunnelling work has to be done to bring the conduit to the house and that nobody is going to pay for everything. “This is the only way it is going to happen,” he said.

The feedback Ferdinands gets from people who have the service is positive. “I can tell you that I have had zero complaints from anybody,” he said. “I get calls from people about how grateful they were that I was able to push it through.”

Ferdinands said the pandemic has certainly highlighted the importance of wireless connectivity.

But as more rural neighbourhoods get serviced with high speed other residents like Carl Twiddy wait anxiously. He has lived on Spruce Tree Lane off Vivian Sideroad since 1984 and is hopeful for an upgrade in service for more than a decade. He currently is with WISP and says for the most part it does what he needs. “It just is undependable. That is the problem with wireless services,” he said.