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 Nomade Telecom and Radioactif will build Wi-Fi across Montreal, Canada: The service will launch in Plateau Mont Royal this fall, and the companies plan to cover nearly 90 percent of the city's population. Montreal has 1.6m citizens spread over 365 sq km (141 sq mi). VoIP service will be part of the offering. Service will run C$30 per month with speeds up to 5 Mbps downstream. (With C$1:US$1 coming soon, C$30 is relatively expensive.)
The network will later extend to the North and South Banks after the first rollout. The firms then plan to build networks elsewhere in Quebec, as well as Halifax, Toronto, Windsor, Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton, and Vancouver. This could be the big launch for metro-scale networks across Canada. So far, the only big city-wide effort in a large town is in Toronto by the incumbent electricity provider.
The Montreal companies have chosen to build service in areas with a population density exceeding 1,000 people per sq km. They expect this to cost C$25m. The Plateau is Montreal's most density populated borough, this article says. This is in opposition to how most municipal efforts have been targeted in the U.S., where a city issues a proposal that requires 90 to 97 percent coverage, with a focus on the areas less served by existing broadband, even if population density there isn't ideal.
The Plateau is also home to the main efforts of community wireless group Île Sans Fil (island without wires) which has quite a few locations.
While the article and the press release both mention WiMax, it's an infrastructure thing--for backhaul. This isn't a mobile WiMax deployment for end users. The press release notes that the downstream speed they're achieving "est possible grâce à l'infrastructure WiMAX déployée en arrière-plan" (is possible thanks to the WiMax infrastructure deployed in the background). But WiMax or WiMax-like technologies are being used by all metro-scale networks and equipment makers; I think the firms just wanted to put WiMax in the headline.
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