Wi-Fi With That Donut? The Fastest Tim Hortons Locations In Canada

Tim Hortons doesn't just keep Canada caffeinated, it's also a major provider of free Wi-Fi. We analyzed more than 3,000 speed tests to find the 20 best-connected Timmies.

If your data plan is too limited to take advantage of Canada's super-fast 4G, there's always Tim Hortons.

There are 4,286 Tim Hortons locations in Canada, which comes to one Timmies per 8,800 people. No single brand in the US has that kind of penetration; we may have 15,065 Starbucks here, but that only comes down to one per 21,000 Americans. (Think about that when your mobile order gets backed up.)

Setting aside the faux-Tim's lurking in gas stations, the vast majority of Tim Hortons outlets have free Wi-Fi, making it one of the largest providers of free Wi-Fi in Canada. McDonald's also offers free Wi-Fi at its restaurants, but there are only 1,450 of those.

Wireless carriers and cities also often have large networks of Wi-Fi hotspots. Telus has free hotspots across most of Alberta, British Columbia, and Manitoba. Shaw has a hotspot network for its subscribers. Here's a list of cities and towns that offer their own hotspots.

Nationwide, though, nothing's quite like Tim Hortons. So for this analysis, we took a look at 3,051 speed tests run on the Ookla Speedtest platform at 1,469 distinct Tim Hortons outlets in 2021. We excluded locations that only had a single test, and double-checked to make sure the downloads weren't just coming from some joker who named their home Internet "Tim Hortons WiFi" (I'm looking at you, Nepean). Finally, we found the 20 verifiable locations with the highest average download speeds.

(Editors' Note: Speedtest by Ookla is owned by Ziff Davis, the publisher of PCMag.)

This Toronto outlet has the fastest Wi-Fi of any Tim Hortons in the city. (Photo: Linda Chen)

How Fast Is Tim Hortons Wi-Fi?

For the most part, Tim Hortons Wi-Fi is on the slow side. Our data set had average download speeds of 22.7Mbps and upload speeds of 6.5Mbps. However, the tests taken at our 20 fastest Tim Hortons spots show a different story. Comprising the top 1.4% of our test set, they average 143.7Mbps down and 36Mbps up, although that's highly skewed by three very fast locations.

Tim Hortons wouldn't comment for this story, but IP addresses show that many of its locations rely on GoCo, a spin-off of Telus that provides business internet access to many large Canadian brands. Obviously, though, some connections are faster than others. All three of the super-fast locations we found (in Etobicoke, Guelph, and Toronto) use IP address ranges assigned to Bell.

The Tim Hortons in Dorion-Vaudreuil, QC, has tables for you to do some laptop work, but only until you run out of battery. (Photo: Matt Orsini)

So where are the fastest Tim Hortons locations?

• 1 in St. John's

• 3 in Metro Halifax

• 3 in the greater Montreal area

• 1 in Ottawa

• 3 in Toronto

• 1 in Edmonton

• 2 in Vancouver

• 6 in other cities

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These are the highlights:

• The fastest Tim Hortons in Canada is in a mall outside Guelph.

• The fastest Tim Hortons in Toronto is just off Bathurst Street in Fort York.

• The fastest Tim Hortons in greater Montreal is in the Quartier DIX30 shopping mall in Brossard.

This Tim Hortons outside Quartier DIX30 has the fastest Wi-Fi of any outlet near Montreal. (Photo: Sean Cooper)

And here's how our 20 winners stack up:

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Fastest" determined by download speed on mobile speed tests conducted using the Ookla Speedtest platform from Jan. 1, 2021 to October 4, 2021. 

This all sounds like fun trivia, but free Wi-Fi can be very important for Canadians because limited-data 4G plans are still so common. Every megabyte you download onto your phone over Wi-Fi is one that doesn't get charged to Virgin or Fido. However, in big cities, all three major wireless carriers showed faster speeds than most Tim Hortons locations, so it might be time to upgrade to an unlimited data plan instead of relying on Timmies. For more on that, see our 2021 edition of Fastest Mobile Networks Canada.

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