The Town of Amherstburg and Bell announced the expansion of pure fibre Internet services today that will reach more than 8,000 additional homes and businesses.
Fully funded by Bell, this broadband expansion program will provide fast and high-capacity 100% fibre connections with Internet download speeds of up to 1.5 Gbps and access to leading expenditures over two years.
Mayor Aldo DiCarlo says it's a big day for the Town, and something that actually started back when he decided to run back in 2014 .
"I was looking at things that the Town needed that would be beneficial. Really just because of my day job in communications, it just popped in and I thought it would be really cool if we could connect an entire small municipality. The big cities obviously have this technology, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find rural areas and small municipalities that are going to be connected."
He says when they put the word out Bell was one of the only companies that came forward, it took a while to figure out how they were going to do it but they invested an incredible amount of money and got it done.
"Let's put it this way, people still don't believe me. I still get contacted out in our rural areas and they'll say things like 'I can get high speed Internet here?' and I said yes fibre is there, all you have to do is contact Bell and get it," DiCarlo said.
Bell representative Darrin Meek says this capital acceleration will significantly increase the connections in rural locations like Amherstburg across Canada.
Meek says when they say this will cover all of the municipality, they mean it.
"This does encompass the whole municipality," he continued. "It presented some challenges in itself, but yes, we're very pleased to be able to partner and develop a winning solution like this to service the whole municipality."
DiCarlo says the pandemic is really what pushed the importance of this given remote work, remote school, and just the usual need for quality Internet.
He says even as new technologies will continue to come out, the Town is now future proof and DiCarlo is hoping that other companies will step forward going forward as well.
— with files from AM800's Rob Hindi