e-commerce and Internet industry in Canada

Today we are talking about the country that occupies most of northern North America. The name of this country originally means “village” (translation from the word “kanta”). That is a country of a parliamentary democracy and a constitutional monarchy, with Queen Elizabeth II as the head of state. Two languages are equally used in this country and both are official: English and French. Canada is the second largest country in the world after Russia. With its closest neighbor the USA Canada has not only mutual borders but the world’s largest trading relationship as well. However, we are here to study the country’s IT and e-commerce infrastructure state.
Canada is definitely one of the world leaders in terms of the broadband penetration and IT infrastructure development. As for the January 2009 Canada ranks as the 12th country in the world for Internet usage, according to http://www.internetworldstats.com data. Thus the end of 2008 showed an enormous amount of Internet users in the country: 28.000.000 that made up 84.3% of the total population. This can be compared with the year 2000 statistic, when it was 12,700,000 or 40.3% users in the country. As for 2005, the growth was noticeable, and the amount of users that year exceeded 20 million making up 67,5%. So, the period of 2000-2008 reflected 120.5% growth. However, Canada’s Internet market share of 11.3% is far behind 88,7% in the US. Nevertheless this two are the only leaders in this region.
It’s an interesting fact, almost a half of countries Internet users (48%) connect at least three times per day. As for the type of Internet connection preference, 53.6% of Canadians use high-speed connection, compared to 33.8% of those in the US.
Canada occupies the 10th position among 30 most developed countries in respect of the Internet access speed and cost, as for the research conducted in 2007 by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF). Average download speed in Canada is 7.6 Mbit per sec (compared to Japan that has the highest speed of 61.0 Mbit per sec and Greece that has the lowest speed of 1.0 Mbit per sec). As for the Internet access cost in Canada, it made up $2.39 per 1 Mb. This price can be compared to the cheapest Internet access in Japan – just $ 0.27 and to the most expensive of $ 60.01 in Mexico. The Canada’s Internet top-level domain or ccTLD is .ca. But it has the number of sub domains: .bc.ca, .mb.ca, .nb.ca, .n. ca, .ns.ca, .nt.ca, .nu.ca, .on.ca, .pe.ca, .qc.ca. Two year registration agreement in the zone of Canada’s ccTLD will cost just $99. It’s cheap enough compared to, for instance, Luxemburg’s cost of $270, but it’s still more expensive than in the USA, where registration in the zone of country’s domain will cost you just $17.5 or $35 (as for http://www.rwgusa.com data).
Well, Canada has an Internet market that is very much attractive for users as well as for ISPs. Broadband service is driven by a government, aiming to establish in Canada the strongest information economy and make it an attractive country for investment. Cable modem and DSL services are reaching the highest level of penetration. The legal definition of broadband in Canada is 1.5 Mbit/s. However, over the recent years the competition between the major broadband Internet providers caused rapid growth in the volume of Internet services available to home users. Below the names of the main Canada Internet service providers, offering the variety of plans, are presented:
• Shaw – offers variety of Internet access speed: from 128 kbit/s to 25 Mbit/s
• Rogers Cable – 256 kbit/s to 10 or 18 Mbit/s
• Videotron – 128 kbit/s to 20, 30 or 50 Mbit/s
• Cogeco – 150 kbit/s to 16 Mbit/s
• Eastlink – 128 kbit/s to 15 Mbit/s
• Bell Internet – 500 kbit/s to 10 or 16 Mbit/s
• Telus – 28 kbit/s to 6 Mbit/s
• Sasktel – 64 kbit/s to 7 Mbit/s
• Colbanet – 800 kbit/s to 24 Mbit/s
• TekSavvy – 512 kbit/s to 5 Mbit/s
• ElectronicBox – 800 kbit/s to 5 Mbit/s
• Novus – 10 Mbit/s to 50 Mbit/s
• Velcom – 288 kbit/s to 64 Mbit/s