Connecting the North Part III: Backbone, redundancy and transport south

By Perry Hoffman

SUCCESSIVE FEDERAL GOVERNMENTS have for years thrown money at the northern broadband problem with varying degrees of success.Programs such as BRAND (Broadband, Rural and Northern Development), Connecting Canadians and now Connect to Innovate are the three most recent ones, backed by hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars. For the most part though, these national initiatives have been more broadly-based, focusing on both the transport and local access problems and many have argued this approach has missed addressing the most pressing problem.That problem is a lack of transport and backbone network redundancy, a critical infrastructure need which the federal government’s Connect...