Let’s get right to it! Here is the breakdown:

You can find the full dataset here.

Earning it the nickname ‘Canada’s Silicon Valley’, Kitchener, Ontario, is a technology powerhouse with numerous tech companies, start-ups, and research institutions. It achieved first place for broadband speed at 287 Mbps. 

Toronto follows closely behind, with 283 Mbps. As the country’s largest city and financial hub, boasting a thriving economy and a diverse range of industries, the demand for the Internet is high, and providers have clearly delivered. 

Neighbouring Brampton scored similarly, with 277 Mbps. Home to a growing business sector, particularly in industries such as advanced manufacturing, healthcare, and information technology, the city has the third-highest connectivity speed in Canada.

The only city in the top five that isn’t in Ontario is Surrey, landing in fourth place. Renowned for its beautiful natural surroundings, including parks, green spaces, and the stunning Fraser River, Surrey achieved an internet download speed of 271 Mbps. London, Ontario, follows closely behind with a broadband speed of 270 Mbps.

It makes sense to see Ontario cities landing in the top 5 as recently the governments of Canada and Ontario invested over $54 million to make the Internet accessible to more than 20,000 homes. This not only will bring a necessary Internet connection to rural Ontario but bring reliable high-speed Internet access to the whole of the country.

Methodology:

1. BonusFinder Canada wanted to reveal the best Canadian cities for gamers to live in.
2. In order to achieve that, they created a seed list of the 20 most populated cities in Canada using Data Commons.
3. Fixed download speeds were obtained from the Ookla dataset with gridded worldwide internet speed data. The data was spatially joined with the coordinates of the cities in Canada using the Geopandas package in Python, which allowed for an average download speed (in megabits per second (Mbps)) per city to be obtained. The coordinates for Canada were obtained from the GADM geospatial data set, (except for Quebec and Montreal which were obtained from the overpass api).
4. Data was also collected on the number of gaming conventions in each city in 2023 using Video Games Con for gaming conventions and Board Game Geek for board games conventions.
5. TripAdvisor was then used to count the number of ‘game and entertainment centres.
6. The number of game development companies in each province was found on Alberta Video Game Studios – Canadian Game Devs.
7. The number of gaming jobs in each city was found using Indeed, using the search term ‘video game’ as well as each city included in the seed list. 
8. All data was then combined into a definitive ranking which was equally weighted. BonusFinder Canada was then able to assign a final score out of 10 to each city and determine which is best and worst for gamers.
9. Data is correct as of July 6th, 2023.

For the Silo, Marissa Pysarczuk.

Here is a link to our friends at https://bonus.ca/ who commissioned this data.