A small internet company is set to expand its services in the Halifax-area after a CRTC ruling, but it may not cause a dramatic change in the internet landscape that some people are hoping for.

City Wide Communications is one of a number of Canadian internet resellers. It buys wholesale quantities of internet services at a discount rate and sells it to consumers.

For years, City Wide Communications has been reselling at speeds that are on the slow side for today's online demands. The ruling will allow them to access speeds that are five times faster, starting with its customers in the Halifax-area.

'Small step'

"This is a relatively small step forward for the internet," said Mike Smit, an associate professor of Information Management at Dalhousie University.

"I think it's great to see competition, and I think that the goal in competition is to ensure that we're paying a fair price, not necessarily a lower price but a fair price."

Smit doesn't believe this will spark dramatic change because bandwidth demands are constantly increasing.

"If you go to a per byte price, we're already seeing internet prices dropping over what they would've been when we first started using the internet," he said.

Demands increase

Smit says the problem is that developers have created games and sites that require high speeds to maintain. So telecommunications companies are dealing with calls for increased service at lower prices.

"It's going to come down to what's the balance between our continued demand for more and more high quality, high data content, with the ability of telecommunications companies to offer us the capacity to do that at a reasonable price," he said. "That's expensive."

Smit says City Wide customers should be thrilled with the news. As for the rest, they'll have to wait and see if there's a spin off. "We may see improved promotional offers where the companies are willing to offer deeper discounts for longer periods of time."

Upgrades to expand

The CRTC ruling allows City Wide to upgrade the service to one area every two weeks, so in a notice to customers, it says it's starting with the Halifax-area because it's the largest.

"We expect to be very busy upgrading our current customers, so we have decided not to update our web site with the new speeds to help reduce the call volume," it said in the notice.