What did I expect? I expected that if a developer has the gall to self proclaim their new construction project “New Downtown Markham” that it would have some aspects of downtown communication infrastructure. Copper and cable doesn’t cut it anymore. If you’re putting in over a thousand residential units, run fiber links to the community. If you don’t want to manage the links, let a third party do it – I drive by 6 companies on my way to work that would have been happy to provide voice and data services to this community. It would have cost the residents here less, we would have had better service, and best of all, we would have had choice. Giving me a choice between Rogers and Bell is like offering me the “choice” between two domestic light beers. They’re both going to be poor substitutes for what I really want, and I’m going to be disappointed either way.

What really gets me is that the Downtown Markham site for office leasing opportunities touts Markham’s “world class infrastructure”. Oh sure, the infrastructure in the city exists… But the way things are now, if a business actually wanted to use that infrastructure they’d have to pay to pull the lines in from the interconnects (rather than just pay to hook into the network that the development should be wired with already). The developer wants to attract fortune 500 companies to build their HQs here. Maybe if a few of them sign on, and the demand is great enough, Remington will pull their heads out of the sand long enough to sign a build out agreement with a local fiber owner. Even if that happens, I’m still stuck. Remington’s development of the future is already built – And it has last decade’s broadband technologies, and last century’s voice tech.