By Ahmad Hathout
BROOKS, Alta. – Proponents of a new partly city-owned fibre network currently in development in the town of Brooks, Alberta are viewing the partnership with the town as a future path forward for other Canadian towns they say are neglected by larger providers.
Michael Weening, president and chief operating officer of U.S.-based cloud and software company Calix, which is providing systems for the build, visited his hometown and met with Brooks mayor John Petrie last week to talk about the $21-million BrooksNet project, which will utilize buried fibre cable and provide gigabit-speed internet to at least 15,000 households. The project is expected to be complete by next fall.
Weening, who was born and raised in the town, said in an interview with Cartt that the $21-million fibre project will show how important it is for public and private entities to come together to connect residents where other providers will not.
“This project illustrates how critical it is for public and private entities to come together to serve remote, rural areas–when no one else will,” said a background document provided by Calix. Also on the project is a group called the Community Network Partners (CNP), which will own the distribution part of the network.
Alan Martens, Brooks’ chief administrative officer, said in an interview with Cartt that big telecom Telus was interested in the build but requested multiples more money from the town for the project with no ownership rights, which he said the town could not afford.
Weening noted that the U.S. currently enjoys a model in which thousands of smaller local service providers are providing high-speed internet to rural markets, while the large providers serve the big cities.
“It’s a very, very, very good model,” Weening said, “because locals care – they set up companies or cooperatives to serve those markets, and it would be a very good thing for Canada to do.”
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the U.S. government’s telecom agency, recently released guidelines for billions in broadband funding that specifically require money recipients to make them available to municipal broadband projects.
But, as Weening suggested, the goal is also to draw people back from the cities to the smaller towns, as many now have work-from-home jobs since the start of the pandemic.
“Our biggest challenge for a rural community is attracting young people and keeping them here,” Mayor Petrie said in an interview with Cartt. “And we see fibre optic internet as a way…where we have the ability to [keep] young people in our community with the jobs of the future, and secondly, maybe attracting people from the urban centres.”
Closer to Edmonton, Sturgeon County is also gearing up for its own broadband fibre network, a build that is currently underway. The town is partnering with the Canadian Fiber Optics Corporation (CFO) for the design, build, operation and provider of services for the open access network, which will be part-owned by the town and allow internet service providers to rent space to provide services.
That project will be the first in which the company – whose infrastructure is in northwestern Alberta – will take any money from the government, as the company’s projects have been 100 percent privately funded up to then, according to its cofounder Jodi Bloomer.
“There are a lot of [request for proposals] out, there’s a lot of talk about open access, there’s a lot of different versions of open access that have been discussed — everything from completely open [to many providers]…exclusivity for a period of time — I’m really curious to see how some of those models turn out,” Bloomer said in an interview with Cartt, adding the company has been approached about what it’s doing and how it’s doing it.
“We’re seeing different models and I think that’s important. I think it’s really important to be flexible and to work with all stakeholders in order to find creative solutions,” she added.
“We’ve been working with Sturgeon County to find a model that works for both the county as well for us and our investors,” she added. “There’s some recent RFPs that have come out that we know for a fact that there is not enough population or density, the [capital expenditure] is too high, in order to justify both private investment and open access with lots of different retailers.”
The Brooks project was announced before the town of Olds, Alberta sued its for-profit gigabit service provider O-Net for failing to pay back a $14-million loan for the fibre infrastructure. O-Net, in fact, wanted to be an internet service provider on the new BrooksNet before it had to deal with the restructuring as a result of the lawsuit, according to Martens.
It also comes as the City of Toronto embarks on its own project – called ConnectTO – that would seek to consolidate city assets to an open access network for other service providers to use to increase competition in the big city.
Martens said Brooks initially wasn’t sure what it wanted, and was open to a range of technologies, including wireless. What it was sure about, however, was that it wanted an open access model.
The town will plow roughly $5.3 million from the Canada Community Building Fund Grant toward the project as a non-repayable amount, while CNP will put in $15.7 million. The end service will provide speeds of at least 10 Gigabits per second, with options to scale up later.
It would be some of the fastest broadband speeds in Canada. “We have to make sure we’re a little bit different than everybody else,” Petrie said, adding as a small municipality, it needs to be prepared for the future to retain residents.
Martens said without the CNP, the project would’ve never been conceived. “It just would’ve been way too expensive for us to do it on our own…without them, we would’ve never been able to do this.”
As for similar future builds, Bloomer is optimistic that companies like hers can fill in the gaps where larger providers find the economics harder to justify.
“We’ve found ways to push fibre out further without relying on the government,” Bloomer said. “There’s definitely a need for grants…in order to better serve the rural and remote areas and we can push fibre out and build that long-term infrastructure that really lasts generations in areas where the incumbent can’t. We [CFO] can make the economics work.”
