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Bell officially launching LTE network tomorrow in Toronto, Mississauga, Hamilton, Kitchener-Waterloo and Guelph
Long Term Evolution (LTE) has the capability of reaching peak download speeds of up to 150 Mbps and upload speeds of up to 70 Mbps. Rogers already has LTE live in Ottawa and will be turning Toronto on September 28th. Even regional carrier SaskTel said their LTE network will be available to their customers early fall of 2012.
Bell announced their intentions to go live with their LTE network “in certain Canadian markets in 2011“… but at the time there was no indication of which cities would be included. That’s all changing tomorrow.
Today, in an after hours press release, Bell announced they will “launch 4G LTE network in Toronto, Mississauga, Hamilton, Kitchener-Waterloo and Guelph tomorrow”. So you can now mark down September 14th as the day that LTE rocketed into various southern Ontario markets all at once. As for what they’ll offer, up first is the 4G LTE Sierra Wireless U313 Turbo Stick, priced at $79.95 on a 3-year contract or $219.95 with no-contract. They also stated “in coming weeks” the 4G LTE Novatel Wireless U679 Turbo Stick will be available. No word on any LTE handsets or tablets. The data -flex rate plans start at $45/month for 1.5 GB (Same as the Rogers basic LTE rate plan).
Bell also stated these initial launch locations are the first to experience LTE, but “additional Canadian markets this year and through 2012″.
Wade Oosterman, President of Bell Mobility, said “LTE is the next step in ensuring Bell continues to deliver the best networks in the world to Canadian consumers and businesses, backed up by the newest data devices and the leading mobile services and content available. LTE will deliver amazing data access speeds – at least three times faster than the Bell HSPA+ network originally launched less than three years ago”.
Source: CNW
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69 comments for “Bell officially launching LTE network tomorrow in Toronto, Mississauga, Hamilton, Kitchener-Waterloo and Guelph”
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Way to strike back at WIND and to get ahead of Rogers’ LTE launch in Toronto! But still a little puzzled as to why it’s not in Ottawa at all.
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Obviously Bell charges tons more. What i meant is that the LTE *might* have some appeal to the very techie people attending the computer programs at K-W.
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Why would it be in Ottawa?
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bob, to “compete” against Rogers!
Anyway, i don’t like their idea right now. Zoned service, currently with less zones than Public Mobile, but with ridiculous costs.
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Maybe they wanna launch in major canadian cites, not minor ones that are occupied by Stephen Harpercrite
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Wakeup TELUS! We want LTE in Calgary now!
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Mikie, knowing Bell and Telus, what will likely happen is that Bell mostly focuses on the east, while Telus mostly focuses on the west. Both currently share their CDMA and HSPA network, so there is combined coverage, and no separate roaming charges show up on customer’s bills.
Rogers, on the other hand, has their own GSM and HSPA+ networks in all provinces. They do not share them with neither Telus nor Bell. With Wind, Mobilicity and Vidéotron, however, they have roaming agreements for Rogers GSM, but with rather high pay-per-use fees.
If you would like to see where Telus has CDMA2000 coverage, you may check PublicMobile.ca and look at the roaming coverage.
Hope this helps!
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they shouldn’t charge a penny more to get LTE…
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Once again phone guy with his brainwashed logic. Phoneguy, do you think it would be viable to launch LTE with garbage low end devices? I understand you sell phones, however business only makes sense to your handlers. Ever talked to a rep regarding their fees? It’s like talking to a drone. Then ask them if the policy makes sense and 9/10 they pause and try to explain which is an utter fail!
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Hidden due to low comment rating. Click here to see.
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If that were to happen, it would be a quantum leap forward.
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Umm with what bands? The G band? It’s worse than AWS for signal penetration and you think they can build a decent LTE network with that?
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anybody know what frequency Bell will be using?
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same as Robbers LTE over AWS(1700 and 2100 for those who don’t know) however, 700mhz will be used once they Gov’t auctions it off
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I don’t understand how this is usefull?
$45 a month and only 1.6 gigs…. with the speed of 70 mbps 1.6 gig would be finished in couple hours….
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Wasting your money just got “better.” :O
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Actually it would be counted in minutes, LTE plans are just plain stupid at the moment.
While LTE will give us the opportunity to do more while we’re mobile there’s little point if we can only do it for a few minutes a day before hitting outrageous overuse charges.
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Not quite Steve.. at 150mbps download you can pull down 1.5GB in around 1min, 30 seconds. (not that you’ll get a site you can pull down 150mbps from – just over 18MBps)
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Who on earth would download 70mbps consistently to burn through 1.6 GB?
It’s flawed logic. Yes, if say you were downloading a torrent, that would work. But why would you dl something so huge on a phone? Just don’t be an i***t. Normal usage will be no different. Webpages still take just as long to read. Youtube videos still take just as long to watch, they just load quicker. It’s not like you load a video, then immediately load anothe rwithout watching.
If you’re a F U C K I N G Moro n, yes, you would burn through 1.6GB in a few minutes. For everybody else not mentally challenged, it just improves the user experience.
While yes, I think it is a bit overpriced (Should be $30/1GB at most) people here are just bitching because they can.
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At the theoretical maximum speed of 150Mbps, one can reach their monthly bandwidth cap of 1.5GB in 80 seconds… awesome? Nah
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ooohh snap, bhell just bit ch slapped robbers hard ahahhahaha
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Derrr. I want this in vancouver.
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why does everyone think just because you have faster speeds that you will use up your cap faster? it will just download everything faster. if a video is 30 mb it wont use space on LTE it will just d.l in 1 second apposed to 1 min. usuage wont change at all.
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Booo. If there was ever evidence of price collusion, this is it. The CRTC released those frequencies for the benefit of canadians living in rural areas needing high speed Internet access. This pricing is no better than satellite data, and keeps it out of reach of practically everyone. The CRTC should have mandated pricing structures when they sold it.
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No thank you. I will keep my 6GB for 30 instead of paying 45 for 1.5GB to have my webpages or DL load a few seconds faster.
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what frequency will they be using for LTE?
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“same as Robbers LTE over AWS(1700 and 2100 for those who don’t know) however, 700mhz will be used once they Gov’t auctions it off”
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Posted by chall2k5 | September 13, 2011, 8:51 pm
It was posted right above…
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1.5 gig for $45 Plus tax! If anyone even considers this needs a head check!
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Or they have a money tree growing in the backyard.
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Although I agree that the pricing is a bit ridiculous, most of you either seem to have forgotten/are completely unaware of how expensive 3G HSPA used to be back in the days, a bit over 2 years ago, some people would pay 40$ for 25mb. I work for Rogers and I’ve had people up until last year who would come in with those plans and I could not believe the premiums they used to/continued to pay only because they gotten their internet access a year+ ago when it was not mainstream.
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To those who say you can burn through 1.5 GB in an hour. Are you going to be streaming downloads all hour long. It makes no difference in 1GB REGULAR DATA PLANS OR LTE plans. Only difference is how your download. One is way faster but can still use the SAME AMOUNT OF BANDWIDTH.
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LTE is meant to be a home as well as mobile based network. See how far 1.5Gb gets you in a month on your home computer.
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im waiting to see who has the “fastest” network….. it looks like Bell will have the bigger one
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1) Still pretty expensive for their LTE plans.
2) Even though they are ahead of Rogers in terms of launching it in Toronto, there’s no LTE enabled hand set which gives Rogers the +1
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I don’t see what goo these announcements are for the new networks without any phones=(
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I do wonder what hand set they’ll be getting for LTE. Needless to say, I doubt that people would want to dish out a huge amount for data plans. Better off with the regular one.
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After seeing these prices I officially have no interest in LTE. Ill stick to HSPA+ enabled phones which are fast enough for what I need, and hold onto my 6 gig plan thank you very much!
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hey Adam…. so when lte is old tech and there are speeds 1500 mbps with new tech what will be the difference? speed right. so if a page loads in 1.5 seconds over hspa + and 0.5 seconds over lte is that the main reason to have lte. if LTE is not going to be used for large capacity downloading then there is no point for the technology.
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Yeah, because HSPA is so fast and reliable…
at best, you get 5mbps out in real-world usage. even still, pages will occasionally load slow.
The thing is, it’s not webpages, but things like youtube videos. Rather than 30 seconds of loading, it’s 3.
Other than that, it’s a newer, more reliable data option. If you really use it to download 700MB movies and entire albums then you’re an i***t. That’s what dedicated wired internet connections are for. There’s a reason those have 60, 80, unlimited caps.
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Too bad their SGS2 isn’t LTE. Although it will be cool if one of the carriers gets a deal to release the LTE Nexus Prime on their networks just like Verizon in US is rumored to have.
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I wonder where Bhell got inspiration for their pricing structure. Matching ≠ competing. Bell can shove their LTE up theirs.
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The prices are same ad rigers i think they have some meetibg or somethibg abd rigers was ibviously first to launch lte in canada
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@adumb…. oops I meant Adam. what good is lte in major cities? think about that seriously! if everyone has broadband at home and wifi hotspots everywhere too… what is the real point of lte? lte is to bring rural Canada connected with urban Canada. that is the #1 reason. bring all if Canada under high speed data connection. to link everything together. not stupid YouTube i***t
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provide communication and linking with stores, banks, emergency systems, television, internet, etc. that is the purpose of lte.
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Hopefully Wind Mobile will get a fair chunk of 700mhz during the upcoming auction. Their intention as I understand it is to deploy LTE on 700mhz.
If this happens, Rogers and Bell will be forced to provide LTE service at a reasonable price.
I expect that the ridiculous LTE pricing may be due in part to the fact that Bell & Rogers know that they won’t be able to get away with this kind of gouging once Wind launches LTE, so why not make hay while the sun shines?
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Rogers and Bell are both in the business of selling you home internet though dsl and cable. Therefore if they make LTE reasonably priced, they would be shooting themselves in the foot. LTE is even faster than an average home connection, but they would prefer you pay for both connections.
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what a joke? this LTE is totally useless. At 150 Mbps, one will eat up 1.5 GB of limited bandwidth at whooping $45/month within an hour. The LTE can only be put in use with unlimited bandwidth.
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Makes no sense… I mean the price increase over HSPA+ data network speeds. LTE is a way for the tel co’s to reduce their expenses in investments for providing data access in heavily populated urban areas. Considering users would not change their habits of using the internet on their cellphone as the prices are prohibitive from doing high usage activities such as video streaming, it will take less time to download the required info to our cell phone and allow increased capacity for additional users to connect to the same cell tower simultaneously and consecutively. So less need to construct and maintain additional cell towers. I hope once 700 mhz auction is over prices will go down but I’m not betting on it. I think it’s just one of those “just because they can” cases of pricing.
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Im very disappointed that Bell/Rogers is choosing to charge a premium for their LTE network. Data is data is data is data. It doesnt cost them more to deliver the data to you at a higher speed. This is just as bad as Air Canada charging you the Fuel Surcharge and for all pieces of checked baggage when flying into the States. How are these things not already built into the price of the service??
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Yes LTE technology exists, but frankly what Bell and Rogers is doing is only changing the name from 3g to LTE but really its no different than 3g speeds. This is all a ploy to make you think they will give you better data speeds and trick you to pay higher prices. Because with Wind and Mobilicity forcing BELL and ROGERS to offer better deals to compete, they want to find a way to rip customers off again, and this is a perfect way to do it. Do a simple network name change from 3g to a new name of LTE, and charge premium over charge prices. And to make matters worse there’s no such cellphones that run off LTE. So where’s the logic to give in to their ploy.
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and its like Rogers home high speed interent. Their internet use to be fast back in the day. but then rogers started throttling the data speeds, and then they told their customers, if you want us to give you the fast internet you use to have, you will need to pay an extra fee and we won’t throttle you. Just another Rogers ploy to rip customers off, same with this LTE ploy of there’s just so they can charge more. truth is they started throttling there mobile data lately, and their next move is to tell there customers, change your data plan to LTE and we will give you the internet speed you use to have but pay more for it.
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Half of you stupid posters need to read-up on WHAT LTE IS before posting nonsense about hitting your cap in minutes. Wow.
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The plans make perfect sense. Launch ridiculously high prices and then claim they need free access to the 700MHz auction to bring prices down. Mark my words.
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I watch Netflix on the train so I could easily blow through this cap. I really don’t understand the posters who claim this isn’t an issue.
If all you’re doing is light web browsing and email, why would you pay a premium for lte in the first place?
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This comment doesnt make sense. If you are on the train for 30 minutes watching a 30 minute show, the amount of data streamed to your device is the exact same whether you are on EDGE, 3G, 3G+, 4G LTE. If a 30 minute HD show is 1 gig, all that will change is how fast you receive your show. So your chances of buffering will be lower but no other difference. So it wouldnt matter how fast the data speed is.
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When i get my first LTE bill, I’ll just file for Bankruptcy
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Anyone who downloads torrents using their phone is an i***t!!!
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What about people that want to use their phone to watch netflix? Are they also stupid? I would say that people that need these speeds to check their emails are the bigger i****s.
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Blazing fast speeds with a data cap that prevents you from doing anything fun!!?? Who do I give my money to?
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So, if you watch Netflix on your phone as it is, and you download a 700mb file for the video, how is 700mb any different on a faster network than a slower one? The quantity is the same, and the hour and a bit it takes to watch it can still be quantified as an equal amount of time, i fail to see the argument? If anything, its more convenient cause it loads faster and has to buffer less, but honestly now… Size is identical. It’s like complaining that you’re going to get from point A to point B faster on a 2 wheel bicycle versus a unicycle even though the person riding it has the capacity to operate both bikes equally well.
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The point you continually miss is you can’t do that NOW and you can’t do that with LTE because of the low data caps. Why do you need these ridiculously fast download speed when all you can do with it is check your email? It’s pointless to upgrade to LTE. Is that clear?
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mark my words, there’s no such thing as BELL and ROGERS using LTE, its just a ploy to raise prices again. Its still 3g speed in disguise. They need a reason to raise prices cause they want only one thing, to rip off customers like they use to before wind and mobilicity came around. A simple network name change from 3g to LTE and make people believe there’s a network change and to brain wash you in thinking its ok to pay $60 per month for 1gb of data again. They showed this on marketplace, they had specialists that proved that big 3 are conning people in thinking they are giving 4g speed but the specialists did data speed tests and it showed its still only 3g speed. And marketplace did say that big 3 are only doing this name change to only do one thing, an excuse to raise prices to rip off consumers. Remember this is Big 3, their only good at one thing. steal money out of your pocket. and they’ll use any method in order to con you in order to rip you off.
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Rich: yes, it should buffer faster and stall less. On top of that I should be able to get full HD … or at least regular sd … instead of having to use the lowest quality settings (I’m tethering to my tablet). But Netflix at that quality will burn through my cap before the first movie is over. Heck, even a one hour TV show would cause huge overage fees.
Again, what’s the point of expensive speed you can’t use? Why buy a Ferrari if you can only use it to the end of your driveway?
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So, why would anyone blame the carrier for being a consumer that consumes faster than others? Do you blame the league MVP because he is more efficient or because of your own shortcomings? It just doesnt make sense being a consumer and blaming the company for the inherent ability to consume more at a faster rate based solely off the argument that said company delivers the same content at a faster rate. It’s like arguing with an old person about the benefits of the future. “I dont needs my fancied big ol’ super fasts hi-fi television!, gimme mah ol’ CRT ‘n Andy Griffith any day ‘o the week! Then we’ll go on down to tha crick fer a swim.” It’s like driving said Ferrari 2 blocks on premium versus walking instead. Both are viable, however expect to pay a premium for the performance and superior results.
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If Bell was car maker and they released a state of the art new car, that goes faster and has more horsepower than your current car, but you need to fill it up every ten kilometers…. you would be here saying people are stupid for wanting to go places with their expensive new car. Where the rest of us are saying it is stupid to spend all that money on a new car that can’t go anywhere.
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No thanks ..$ 45/month for 1.5 GB ..lol
and they have speeds of 150 Mbps ..so technically if I download at full speed ..I will reach my 1.5 GB limit in 10 seconds ..lol & after that I’ll get hosed BIG TIME for going over my cap .
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I would like to didcuss business opportunities with your marketing executives please. My name is jeanette T. Lopez, and I am one of the Executive Directors for Profit Dynamics International Limited based in Nigeria, I am managing our brach here in the US which is located in Pittsburg California. I would like to bring Bell and all its products to Nigeria, If you can send me an e Mail so we can discuss this business proposal I would greatly appreciate it. Hoping to hear from soon.
your,
Jeanette T. Lopez
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Does anyone know what eNodeB vendor(s) they went with for this deployment?
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Its always good to compare and contrast but what iam sure of is that the new introduced tech is best as per now coz new technology builds up on previous one so no way one can take abackword step in a foward moving world of technology.So big up bell!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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