TELUS Investing $1 Billion to Make Vancouver the World's Next Gigabit-Enabled City

VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA--(Marketwired - Oct. 2, 2015) - TELUS is investing $1 billion to connect the majority of homes and businesses in the City of Vancouver directly to the company's state-of-the-art fibre optic network over the next five years.

"Bringing fibre optic infrastructure directly to homes and businesses is a generational investment, and the most significant contribution our organization can make to propel Canada's communications infrastructure and ensure its global competitiveness for decades to come," said Darren Entwistle, TELUS President and CEO. "With more than half of the world's population currently concentrated in urban centres, and increased urbanisation a reality for the future, cities with the capacity to leverage advanced broadband technology will enjoy an unprecedented advantage. Our $1 billion investment will provide one of Canada's largest urban centres with ubiquitous access to the fastest and most reliable Internet services to dramatically improve the way Vancouverites live, work and socialise. Once complete, TELUS' fibre build will add more than 400,000 homes, businesses, hospitals, community centres and municipal offices to our fibre-lit landscape. We will dramatically improve citizens' lives through significant new social, educational and economic opportunities and empower governments to build a greener, more inclusive and globally competitive Vancouver."

TELUS' fibre optic network is among the most advanced communications infrastructure available in the world today, allowing dramatically faster Internet speeds and vastly more capacity than current networks. This new fibre optic infrastructure will also be the backbone of TELUS' wireless network, enabling even more wireless capacity and speed. When the first Vancouver neighbourhoods are fully connected early next year local residents and businesses will be able to take advantage of home Internet speeds of up to 150 megabits per second. TELUS plans to offer families and businesses in Vancouver increasingly higher speeds over this gigabit-enabled network in the coming years, as demand continues to increase. Importantly, local healthcare providers, educators and technology companies will also be able to draw upon the network to completely reimagine how they deliver existing services and develop entirely new solutions.