The Financial Post reports in its Friday edition BCE's Bell Canada plans to spend $1.14-billion through the end of 2017 to upgrade and build out its fibre optic cable network in Toronto. The Post's Christina Pellegrini writes some time this summer, users in roughly 50,000 homes and businesses in unspecified areas across Toronto will be connected to the network infrastructure required to access a new product called Gigabit Fibe, which Bell says can deliver download speeds of as much as a gigabit, or 1,000 megabits, per second. Bell expects it will have a footprint of 1.1 million premises in the city by the end of the project. Internet service providers are in a high-stakes race to satisfy consumers' increasingly insatiable demand for constant connectivity and faster download speeds. Rival Rogers Communications says it can achieve download speeds in its cable wires of up to 250 megabits per second. Bell field crews will install more than 90,000 kilometres of new fibre cables. Bell says it has agreements in place with Toronto Hydro to share the utility poles, which "should help lower deployment costs and speed up deployment," RBC Capital Markets analyst Drew McReynolds said in a note to clients Thursday.