Purple Cow Internet’s Purple Fibre network is live in Fairview and Fairmount, and the Halifax company says the two neighbourhoods roughly double the number of homes in the municipality that can get it.
It’s a Halifax company with about 40,000 customers running its own fibre up its own poles, which nobody else in the region is doing.
The plan is $60 a month for 2 Gbps download and 2 Gbps upload. Wi-Fi 6 router included, no contract, free installation, and the company says the price doesn’t jump at the 12-month mark. Purple Cow’s pitch is that $60 is roughly what many households already pay Bell or Eastlink for 100 Mbps cable, so the same money buys twenty times the download speed and two hundred times the upload speed.
The company isn’t shy about the point. In a post on its blog, Purple Cow calls Fairmount “milestone #2,” says Nova Scotia has been paying some of the highest internet prices in the country for far too long, and frames every household that switches as pressure on the incumbents to sharpen their pricing for everyone else.
The CRTC has been making a version of that argument for years. Its pricing data shows Atlantic Canadians pay above the national average for home internet at most speed tiers, and Canadians overall pay more than most of their international peers. The regulator has repeatedly pointed to a lack of competition as the cause, and its wholesale-access rules were meant to give smaller providers a way in.
Those rules are how Purple Cow got started, and founder and CEO Bradley Farquhar says they’re also why the company is now spending its own money to build instead of rent.
“I’m honestly grateful to the CRTC for the wholesale access rules that let Purple Cow get started,” Farquhar said. “Those regulations gave us the ability to build our herd to over 40,000 households by leveraging the incumbent network to transport our internet, and we wouldn’t be here without them. But renting somebody else’s pipes was never going to change the industry forever. If we want the Atlantic provinces to go from being the most expensive place in Canada for telecommunications to being the least expensive, we have to build our own network, pole by pole. Fairview and Fairmount are two more steps in that direction.”
“Every household that switches to Purple Fibre is helping fund the next street, the next neighbourhood, the next community,” he said. “We don’t have the incumbents’ balance sheet. What we have is customers who are tired of getting squeezed and want to build something better. Fairview and Fairmount are the next people we get to prove it to.”
Purple Fibre runs on XGSPON, a fibre-to-the-home standard that delivers the same multi-gigabit speed in both directions over a single line. Purple Cow says it is the first and only provider to deploy it in Atlantic Canada, with residential speeds up to 8 Gbps.
The company was named Best Internet Plan and Best Value Plan for Halifax by PlanHub, an independent telecom comparison platform, and is the highest-rated internet service provider in Canada on Google. It offers TV and home phone as well, and says it is already scouting where Purple Fibre goes next.
Fairview and Fairmount residents can check whether their address is covered at purplecowinternet.com/purplefibre or by calling or texting 902-800-2660.
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