Shaw My New Best friend

Well, only if they give me Internet.

Last week, I put up a post discussing Google’s plans to provide 1 Gbps Internet to up to 500,000 homes for a test run in the US.  Well, it appears that a Canadian company has the same idea.

Ars Technica is reporting that Shaw is planning to roll out their own 1000 Mbps testbed up here in Canada.  Which is amazingly cool for for us Canadians.  But, the unfortunate thing about Shaw being the provided of this new 1 Gbps network is that Shaw currently doesn’t offer High Speed internet in my area, so I doubt I’ll be seeing a 1 Gbps connection any time soon. But if your luck enough to have Shaw in your community, you may be in luck. 

Shaw many not be a house hold name for many people that read this blog, so I'll tell you a little about them.  Shaw is one of the large telecommunication companies up here in Canada, which offers Telephone, Internet and TV services to many communities across Canada.  Shaw also owns several TV stations and must recently reached an agreement to buy CanWest.  But what makes this interesting is that by Shaw, a major high speed internet provider, stepping into the 1 Gbps space, I have to believe that the other high speed internet companies will feel pressured to follow suit.  The same way Google's announcement will put pressure on ISP's in the US to increase their speeds.

With the debate over net neutrality still hotly debated, I have to wonder if this new high speed internet race will lead to the end of this debate.  The chief argument that ISPs have used to argue against net neutrality is that they have to packet shape in order to allow us all to have Internet. Basically, the ISPs don't have the infrastructure to handle all of our Internet usage and so they need to curb certain types of traffic in order for all of us to be able to have Internet access.  But, as our Internet gets faster ISPs will be forced to upgrade their networks' to handle the new load, thus making their argument less relevant.  Which might be what Google was hoping for.

In any case, because of the efforts of Google and Shaw we can look forward to a faster Internet sometime in the future. And I really think these guys need to be applauded for it.

So what are your thoughts?  What would you do with a 1 Gbps Internet connection?