I have been asked why Truespeed never had a proper blog. While I’d like to think I have been too busy running a business, talking to people and building networks to take the time to sit down and write about them, the honest answer is I am not a fan of talking about myself. With our renewed focus on growth, the community, and all things Canada, this felt like the right year to change that. And if we’re going to have a blog, the first post should probably explain who we are, where we came from, and where this company is going. So here it is, straight from me.
I’m Adam MacGregor, president and CEO of Truespeed Internet Services. We’re an independent internet company based at 803 Chelsea Street in Brockville, Ontario. Brockville isn’t just where the office is: it’s home. I couldn’t imagine running this company anywhere else. And for our friends across the pond who I occasionally hear from, the UK ISP with the same name is pure coincidence. Effectively, we share a name and nothing else, and there’s no affiliation between us. Truespeed is 100% Canadian owned and operated, fiercely so, and I’ll proudly state that’s one thing that will never change.
How this started
Truespeed came to be in 2014 with a simple act: giving back to a community that needed better internet access. If you live in Eastern Ontario, you know exactly what I mean. Drive less than ten minutes off the 401 and the coverage maps from the big carriers go quiet. And yet, the houses don’t stop. The farms don’t stop. The kids with homework and the businesses trying to run a debit terminal don’t stop.
I live here. This community is not a blip on a map and the people who live here aren’t any part of a calculated formula for profitability to me. As a way to give back to the community that has supported me since I moved here in 1998, we started putting up fixed wireless equipment and connecting the homes the big networks had skipped. No fancy launch, no marketing budget worth mentioning. A customer would get connected, then their neighbour would call, then the neighbour’s cousin two concessions over. That’s how an internet company grows out here: word of mouth, one county road at a time.
Over the years, that little wireless operation grew into something much bigger. We connected with cable, DSL, and fibre service across Ontario and Quebec. We added home and business phone, live streaming TV, web design and hosting, and managed IT services for local businesses. Through all of it, we kept the same rules we started with: honest pricing, unlimited data, no throttling, and no mandatory contracts on the vast majority of what we sell. When you call us, a local person answers. While we may still have hold music (sometimes we need to put people on hold to do our work, so there’s no sense in being bored), you’ll never hear a script being read at you from several time zones away.
The years everything grew
Listing awards doesn’t come naturally to me, so let me say up front: everything in this section belongs to our team and our customers more than it belongs to me. But it’s part of the story, so here it is.
In September 2017, Canadian Business ranked Truespeed No. 17 in the country on the Startup 50, their ranking of Canada’s top new growth companies, on the strength of 777 per cent two-year revenue growth. For a small crew proudly based in Brockville, it was a surreal thing to see that form of national recognition in print. The next year we made the Startup 50 again. In 2019 we landed at No. 50 on the Growth 500, the long-running list of Canada’s fastest-growing companies, with five-year growth of 1,666 per cent. That same fall, The Globe and Mail launched its Report on Business ranking of Canada’s Top Growing Companies. Four hundred companies made the inaugural list, and Truespeed was fortunate to place No. 34, with three-year growth of 1,474 per cent. In 2020, Canadian Business and Maclean’s put us at No. 60 on the Growth List with five-year growth of 1,496 per cent; our fourth consecutive year on the national rankings. Somewhere in there the Financial Post profiled us in their Innovation Nation series, and in January 2020 CanadianSME Magazine included me in their “50 Most Inspirational Canadian Entrepreneurs” edition, which mostly proved that my mother will frame anything (seriously, if anyone has ever deserved a volume discount at Michaels, it’s her).
The recognition that means the most, though, is the kind that comes from home. In 2016, I was honoured with Business Person of the Year at the Brockville and District Chamber of Commerce Awards of Excellence. I have always thought of that one as a team award that happens to have my name on it. This past winter we were voted top honors of Platinum in CommunityVotes Kingston 2025 (the second win in a row, for us) and Gold for Internet Providers in Best of Kingston & Area 2026. And as I write this, 92 per cent of the people who have reviewed us on Facebook recommend us. In an industry people love to hate, that means more to me than any trophy.
Here’s the thing about all those growth percentages: every point of them was a household or a business deciding to take a chance on a small local provider instead of the default option. The numbers were never really ours. They were yours.
A hard decision, and an honest one
If you follow our news page, you know that this past March I made the most consequential decision of my career: we transitioned a portion of our customers to Altima Telecom. I wrote openly about it at the time, and I’d encourage you to read that letter if you haven’t. The short version: I looked honestly at what the large incumbents are doing in our communities, the aggressive offers loaded with fine print, and asked myself whether staying small across every service line was still the best way to protect the people who depend on us. The answer I came up with was no. Altima has the resources and the network to offer those customers things I simply couldn’t on my own. At some point, I’ll likely dedicate this period to its own blog post, so stay tuned.
The thing is, Truespeed didn’t go anywhere. Neither did I. And since I keep hearing the rumour, let me put it to rest plainly: we are still connecting people to the same services we always have. Fibre, cable, DSL/FTTN, and our rural wireless network; all of it, right now, today. Our web hosting and managed IT customers are right here with us too, along with a faithful handful of dial-up customers we’ll keep online as long as they want to be.
And if we lost you somewhere along the way to Bell or Cogeco, try us again. We are stronger than we’ve ever been, and exceptionally focused on providing downright legendary levels of customer service. We see our clients as family, and keeping someone on hold for hours or increasing their rates arbitrarily isn’t how you treat family. (Could be the material for an interesting blog? Maybe.)
I said in March that it wasn’t a goodbye, it was a chapter. This blog post is me starting to write the next one.
Where we’re headed
I am reinvesting heavily in this company, and I mean that in the most literal, steel-and-fibre sense of the word.
The biggest piece is Air Fibre, our next-generation rural wireless network. Over the past year we kicked off the next phase of that build, with new tower infrastructure going up across the county roads and concessions around the Brockville region that have been the heart of this company since day one. The technology behind Air Fibre is the part I could talk about all day. It’s revolutionary, state-of-the-art wireless equipment delivering the kind of speed and reliability that used to require a buried line, in places nobody is trenching fibre to anytime soon. I’ll save the full story for its own post, because it deserves one. And yes, I hear it: the man took twelve years to write his first blog post and is already promising more. Fair. But I’ll keep these coming whenever there’s something worth talking about.
Rural Eastern Ontario is where Truespeed started, and it’s where we’re doubling down.
We’re also growing our fibre footprint, expanding our managed IT and web services for local businesses, and planning expansion beyond that. Call me an optimist, but it’s an optimism this region earned: Eastern Ontario has spent years being told “maybe later” by the big players, and it keeps building anyway. I have never been more focused on what this company can become, and I genuinely believe the best version of Truespeed is still ahead of us.
What won’t change are the rules I established in 2014. Honest pricing with no games. Unlimited data with no throttling. No mandatory contracts holding you hostage. A 99.9 per cent uptime target, and a local team that fixes most problems the same day you call. This is home for me and for everyone on our team. We drive the same roads you do, we watch the same river go by, and we’ll see you at the grocery store either way.
Why a blog, and why now
A few things you can expect from this space: real updates on our network builds, plain-English answers to the tech questions we hear every day like why speed tests mislead you, how to spot the latest scam going around, whether that jailbroken streaming box from the shady looking fella your buddy knows is a good idea (spoiler, it isn’t), and the occasional bit of good news from around town, because there’s more of it than the headlines suggest.
Every word here will be written by a person at Truespeed, usually me. No agency, no filler, no ten-paragraph preamble before the recipe.
If you’re new to us: welcome. You can check what’s available at your address in about thirty seconds, or call (613) 865-7733 and talk to a human in Brockville. And if you’re one of the people who took a chance on a little local wireless company back when that was all we were, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. Twelve years later, I haven’t forgotten it, and I don’t plan to. Here’s to the next twelve!
Adam MacGregor
President & CEO, Truespeed Internet Services Inc.