Shaw Communications, a Canadian company has announced that they are planning on testing Gigabit Internet technology over a Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) network. Over the last few days, we’ve heard from both Google and the FCC in the US looking to bring ultra high speed internet service to US homes and now there is a company looking to do the same up north.

Currently, the fastest internet service available in Canada is High-Speed Nitro Internet service which comes with a maximum data transfer speed of 100 Mbps. This service is limited to only a select number of larger Canadian cities, namely Vancouver, Edmonton and Calgary. The 1Gbps fiber service announced by Shaw will see the data transfer speed increase by ten fold.

The new internet service is expected to help with new and emerging technologies that may have a dependency on higher bandwidth requirements. One of the reasons that Google was interested in developing high speed networks down south was to accelerate the development of these same technologies, some of which may not even exist at this time.

If all goes according to plan, Shaw expects to begin testing 1Gbps fiber service by April 2010 which is only about two months down the road. This is really impressive, it’ll be interesting to see how many homes will be offered the new service during the testing phase.

Via: CNN