Toronto Readies Massive Downtown Hotspot

If you are visiting the Hockey Hall of Fame or Eaton Centre in central Toronto in the next few months, be sure to bring your wireless laptop.

That's because Toronto Hydro Telecom's recently installed six-square kilometer Wi-Fi hotspot in downtown Toronto will deliver Internet upload and download rates at consistent 5 Mbps, according to an announcement Tuesday.

The Wi-Fi deployment is the largest in Canada and its performance surpasses that of 41 major Wi-Fi hotspots tested by independent testing firm Novarum Inc., according to Toronto Hydro Telecom. The test sites included those in Philadelphia and Google's network in Mountain View.

Called OneZone, the Toronto deployment was completed last month and is scheduled to launch commercially on March 7.

"OneZone's performance is, on average, five times faster than any of the other network we tested," said Ken Biba, a Novarum analyst.

The Wi-Fi hotspot is powered by mesh technology provided by Siemens Mesh@vantage MR products as well as broadband mesh technology from BelAir Networks.