Maize Blanchard pays Bell Canada $198.76 every month. She can easily tell you the precise figure — slowly emphasizing each number — because she has spent hours on the phone with the company trying to negotiate a lower price for her television and internet service.

Blanchard, who is 69 and lives alone in a one-bedroom apartment on Jane Street north of Finch Avenue West, gets by on a pension from Old Age Security. After paying close to $1,000 in rent, her Bell bill and other fixed expenses, she has about $300 left each month for food, medicine and everything else.

Just a few blocks away on Driftwood Avenue, Jennifer Favorite says she can manage her internet bill but she worries about neighbours with small children at home who can’t make it work. “It’s not easy. It’s not easy on me either, but I’m alone, my kids are grown,” said Favorite, 65, a personal support worker who runs her own business online. Both women are members of ACORN, an anti-poverty group that has been calling for more affordable internet.

It’s stories like these that have prompted city staff in Toronto to recommend an audacious plan: the city should build its own high-speed broadband network.

Unlike in many rural areas and Indigenous communities, it’s not that Torontonians don’t have access to high-speed internet —the city is blanketed with fast connections. The cost is just too high for some, who either cut back on essentials like food or go without internet access.

If the city’s plan works, it would help residents in priority neighbourhoods get high-speed access without the high prices charged by Toronto’s two major internet providers, Bell and Rogers. The proposal calls for pilot projects in three low-income areas, Jane-Finch in North York and Malvern and the Golden Mile in Scarborough and Toronto’s chief technology officer Lawrence Eta said residents there could see service by the end of this year.

More at Toronto Star.