BSO Hearing Day #2: Why getting the backbone right is so critical to the North

By Perry Hoffman

GATINEAU - Including broadband in a redefined basic service objective (BSO) is an absolute requirement, the Nunavut Broadband Development Corp. (NBDC) and SSi Group of Companies told the CRTC on the second day of its basic service obligation hearing. The problem in getting good broadband in the Far North, they say, is the lack of adequate backbone infrastructure.“The bottleneck for Nunavut is backbone and that cannot be solved with a fragmented approach where services for consumers are supported separately from services for business or government. All Nunavut users rely on the same upstream services delivered over the same inadequate infrastructure...