By Lynn Greiner
AFTER MORE THAN A DAY of seeking solutions and strategy for delivering fast, affordable internet to various un- and underserved communities, things at last week’s Canadian Rural and Remote Broadband Conference concluded with some hard lessons learned along the way. The session was aptly called “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”.
Moderated by Jason Presement, regional vice president of sales at Calix, panelists included Laura Bradley, general manager of YorkNet, Ron Huinink, manager, broadband at supplier Telonix, Justin Cameron, regional sales manager, Ontario and Atlantic, at supplier TVC, and Keith Ponton, senior systems consultant at IBI Group.
The panelists started off with some examples of good deployment experiences.
YorkNet, for example, has received $2 million in funding to connect some of the northern communities of York Region, including a First Nation (the Chippewas of Georgina Island First Nations), and Bradley explained one thing which has improved the experience is engaging early with all authorities who issue necessary permits for the work. In this case, the 55-km deployment needed permits from the Ministry of Natural Resources, several municipalities, rail crossings, and more. Bradley’s team took its preliminary plans, including alternate routings, to the appropriate authorities so problems could be avoided or mitigated before the permit application process began.
“By doing that, we were able to start the conversations much earlier,” she said. “Often, if you wait until design and then file for the permit, you don’t find out about issues that may not be within the context of a specific guideline. This gave us the opportunity to have those early on conversations and actually to our impression and belief right now it’s actually making our deployment much quicker.”
This approach came from Bradley’s experiences before joining YorkLink, and from knowing the authorities wouldn’t cut them any slack simply because YorkLink is a municipal corporation. Issues discovered and corrected before permitting begins mean a faster process.
“One of the things we’ve created is fly-bys,” she said. “We use Google Earth, and my team goes through and creates a fly-by so that they can show the municipal consent authority exactly what the street looks like that they’re thinking of going down and getting their feedback directly on issues they see, without even being in the field.”
Cameron’s input was from the supplier side. To him, an ideal installation experience occurs when the exact equipment and supplies get to the customer site on time. Today he’s having to account for the fact that fibre deliveries now sometimes take 20 weeks.
“Instead of an afterthought where somebody is going to have it on the shelf, it becomes more important to consider it earlier on in the project lifecycle.” – Justin Cameron, TVC
“The need to secure (fibre) allocations for some of these projects that are being planned for in the early stages becomes more and more important,” he pointed out. “Instead of an afterthought where somebody is going to have it on the shelf, it becomes more important to consider it earlier on in the project lifecycle.”
Huinink agreed, adding, “I think when people are looking at planning a product, the network that you’re building, it’s not just about product, it’s not just about permits, it’s really cross functioning. You have to look at your operational costs, what they’re going to be, looking at your operational team. Who’s going to service it, who’s going to take care of it, what are they capable of doing?” With rural broadband, some customers have more capacity and capabilities than others, and that capacity has to factor into planning decisions.
“To give one really bad, ugly example (of the result of poor planning), that I’d heard of in Canada, where the planning was done really well on the one aspect and then they totally forgot about interconnection,” he said. “They had a great network inside a town but they couldn’t really interconnect properly and then they looked at a lot more work and a lot more money in the end to interconnect the community after they were all done.”
One other factor that, if neglected, can turn a project ugly is a lack of communication.
“Right from the day after municipal council approves a project, there’s likely a superficial expectation they’re going to see construction equipment in the street that week following, not realizing it’s probably going to take two to three months to get all the permits in place to actually start construction.” – Keith Ponton, IBI Group
“What I would overlay on this discussion in terms of successful deployments is communicate, communicate, communicate,” Ponton said. “Despite the best plans you may have, things will happen and you need to set expectations appropriately. Right from the day after municipal council approves a project, there’s likely a superficial expectation they’re going to see construction equipment in the street that week following, not realizing it’s probably going to take two to three months to get all the permits in place to actually start construction. So, setting expectations appropriately at many levels: stakeholders, investors, and I’ll say right down to the actual subscribers of your network.”
Interdepartmental communication is also key, Bradley pointed out. Sometimes two municipal departments plan at cross-purposes, or duplicate effort, because the groups’ lines of communications never cross. Everyone has to be aware of what the others are doing.
“I’ve even seen instances of two radio towers being developed on the same hillside, same municipality, two different departments that that didn’t seem to be able to communicate with each other and share resources.” – Laura Bradley, YorkNet
“We’ve seen multiple situations and multiple municipalities where parallel infrastructure is being built, whether it be fiber network that that parallels another department’s infrastructure that nobody knew about,” Ponton said. “I’ve even seen instances of two radio towers being developed on the same hillside, same municipality, two different departments that that didn’t seem to be able to communicate with each other and share resources. So certainly, planning is important and making your plans public, but also being able to reach out and understand what the left hand or right hand is doing I think will eliminate some of those potentially embarrassing moments.”
Building in rural areas is completely different than urban areas too, Huinink noted. “I think you can do the ‘customer product network-in-a-box’ type of scenario for an urban area, but when it comes to a rural area, there’s no real set solution,” he said. “You really need to look at exactly where you’re building, who your customers are, and how you’re going to feed them.”
Added Ponton, “The economics are far different in the rural market and if you look at it from a traditional the carrier metric of cost per home passed in the rural market, it can be two or three times more than the urban environment so it’s a single infrastructure environment.
“Facilities based competition is not likely to happen in rural markets because of the market size, so having the right business model and enabling open network access so the network infrastructure can be leveraged across many different service providers, I think is vitally important.”
