OTTAWA – Rural and remote broadband was back on the agenda at the Parliamentary Industry committee this week.
The Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) used its appearance to call on the federal government to take the next step in ensuring that Canadian consumers and businesses in rural and northern communities have access to the same networks and broadband speeds as those in urban regions of the country.
Daniel Rubinstein, a policy analyst at the FCM, told the House of Commons Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology on March 19 that while programs such as Broadband Canada: Connecting Rural Canadians has brought the minimum standard of 1.5 Mbps to many rural communities, more needs to be done. “With the rate of technological change, the rapid transition to electronic delivery of government services, and the widespread adoption of business offerings that require real time and robust broadband access, there’s much more that must be done to ensure the digital divide between urban and rural does not widen further,” he said during his opening remarks.
The upcoming auction of 700 MHz spectrum, through its rural rollout requirements, should help provide such communities with additional broadband access needs. Plus, signals in that band travel far, meaning it’s well-suited for a rural deployment. Officials from Industry Canada, who kicked off the meeting, explained that the rules will ensure that this valuable high-bandwidth spectrum is deployed in rural areas.
But the FCM isn’t so sure. It previously voiced its concern about the effectiveness of the then-proposed conditions of licence requiring rural deployment. Rubinstein reiterated the municipalities’ position under questioning. “We encouraged Industry Canada to reconsider the decision to use the HSPA footprint as we believe it offers no guarantee of rural deployment. We also recommended that Industry Canada include measures to ensure unused rural spectrum is used in a timely fashion,” he said. “We know that the final conditions of licence released last week do not address these concerns which in our opinion may require the federal government to introduce future measures or incentives down the road to ensure that 700 MHz networks are in fact deployed in rural Canada.”
Broadband access in Canada is now at 99%, according to figures from department officials released at the meeting. Industry Canada recognizes that all Canadians, regardless of where they live, should have access to broadband and has taken steps in this regard. Alain Beaudoin, acting assistant deputy minister of spectrum, information technologies and telecommunications at the department, noted that the Broadband Canada program, which expired in March 2012 was able to connect 218,000 additional rural and remote households not already online.
(Ed. Note: What has still not been discussed at the committee yet is what can be done to help the households which are passed by broadband networks, but who are not connected because they can’t afford it. Other countries have such programs to help their poor get wired. Canada has nothing, and that’s shameful.)
The FCM believes that additional measures can be taken by Industry Canada to ensure that more communities get broadband. Rubinstein pointed to TV white spaces spectrum as one option. Trials in the U.S. and the U.K. have demonstrated that “there appears to be significant potential for this TV white space to bring broadband to rural communities at a lower cost to networks that using licensed spectrum,” he said. The FCM encouraged Industry Canada to make a decision on this spectrum as soon as possible so trials can begin here.
During the meeting, the FCM noted that it’s no longer sufficient to provide the minimum connectivity requirement of 1.5 Mbps to northern communities. The minimum broadband requirement is going to jump to 5 Mbps in 2015 and this should apply for northern communities as well, said Rubinstein.
He pointed to the 2011 Arctic Communications Infrastructure Assessment (ACIA) report, which provided examples of federal government departments not being able to deliver services to northern communities because of a lack of sufficient broadband infrastructure. “If you only have a satellite connection, then you really can’t do real time entering into a database because you have a four-second latency,” explained Rubinstein.
The FCM also agreed with the ACIA’s recommendation that a patchwork of government programs or regulatory decisions isn’t the most effective way to approach the northern connectivity problem. “We have endorsed the recommendation in that report for a holistic strategy to look at northern connectivity, not in an ad hoc way – an IC program here, the CRTC has a decision here – we need to look at it in a holistic manner so when 2016 comes and the current set of subsidies expire, that there is a comprehensive solution that takes into account that user demands are increasing every year,” said Rubinstein.
Industry Canada officials kicked off the March 19 hearing, highlighting the significant efforts undertaking by the Canadian private sector to expand fixed and mobile broadband networks and the benefits to the Canadian economy has realized through broadband.
Canadian investments in broadband networks of all sorts were $9.4 billion in 2011 up from the $8.4 billion in 2010, said the ministry, and Canadian telecommunications operators are investing a higher rate than many of its peer nations. Capital intensity among Canadian carriers was of 22% in 2011 (the amount of capital invested in networks compared to revenue). These investments are bearing fruit for Canadian consumers and businesses because more and more of them have access to the highest speeds over fixed lines and through mobile networks, according to the officials. Beaudoin noted that more than 75% of Canadian households can access 50 Mbps Internet services, an increase from 30% in 2009. On the wireless side, LTE networks are now available to two-thirds of the Canadian population up from 45% at the end of 2011.
