By Lynn Greiner
THERE ARE MANY WAYS to get broadband connectivity into rural and remote areas, and at Canada’s Rural and Remote Broadband virtual conference (CRRBC) on Tuesday, a panel of experts spent a lively hour discussing the models they use and the challenges they face.
Led by moderator Colleen McCormick, who leads the Connected Communities BC program in the Ministry of Jobs, Economic Development and Competitiveness, panelists included Lisa Severson, director of communications at the Eastern Ontario Regional Network (EORN), Paul Ouimette, director of operations at NEOnet, Brian Cullen, chief administrative officer at the municipality of the county of Pictou, Nova Scotia, and Colleen Sklar, executive director, Winnipeg Metropolitan Region and JohnQ Public Impact Inc. (JohnQ), a consortium of more than a dozen municipalities in the region that acts as a shared services arm whose aim is to reduce cost, build capacity, and increase the economic competitiveness of the province.
Each panelist has a different way of pushing out connectivity. To serve a population of around 21,500 over 2,800 square kilometres, Cullen has focused on a mix of wireless and fibre to the home (FTTH). Initially, he said, the mix was two-thirds fixed wireless to one-third FTTH, but that has switched to two-thirds FTTH and one-third fixed wireless as issues such as dead spots emerged.
“The model we are operating under is the municipality will build the core backbone fibre,” he said. “We will bring additional backbone fiber into the community from Truro, Nova Scotia to our municipal office, and then we will create an open access network and attract ISPs – small, medium, large, whoever is interested in coming on to the network – to provide the end service to the homeowners. So, our goal in our network is really to provide 100% coverage to every citizen.”
He wants to beat the CRTC 50Mbps download/10 Mbps upload target so he has a network that provides the foundation for economic growth.
Sklar, like Cullen, has had brutal reminders of the inadequacies of the current network during the Covid-19 lockdown, with some staffers and colleagues having to drive into town just to get connectivity.
“What was happening was the communities, large and small across each municipality, had a different ability to service the communities and to participate as a partner in this,” she said. “So through the JohnQ approach, what we said is communities, municipalities, would be partners, regardless of their size, as an all-for-one model and so we were basically looking at providing backbone and last mile services to communities, in partnership with ISPs.”
Since JohnQ is a private-public partnership, the money it generates can be reinvested in communities that don’t have the capital to start to contribute to some of these backbone initiatives. Sklar also wants to make sure the Indigenous communities within the metro region and beyond have access to service as well.
“We’ve got communities where they’re working with local ISPs right now, and for quite large sums of money – hundreds of thousands of dollars – are only servicing small, densely populated areas pockets of their communities, leaving the farms and the other rural residents with no access and really little chance of access.” – Colleen Sklar, John Q Public Impact
“It’s really about kind of a cross between a co-op model and a corporation, so we’re pretty excited about trying to figure out how we make sure there’s the funding for infrastructure to be put in place to allow all ISPs to play in this space, but also to make sure that that critical infrastructure gets put in place,” she said. “We’ve got communities where they’re working with local ISPs right now, and for quite large sums of money – hundreds of thousands of dollars – are only servicing small, densely populated areas pockets of their communities, leaving the farms and the other rural residents with no access and really little chance of access. So the JohnQ model is really about leveling the playing field.”
Ouimette has taken a different tack. Over decades, northeastern Ontario’s NEOnet has chosen the path of least resistance, putting in solutions like DSL that can be implemented quickly. That’s now changing.
“We’re now at a point where the paradigms have shifted and we’re at a crossroads,” he said from his home in Timmins. “The demands on the worldwide web have significantly changed from just three months ago, let alone a year or five years ago. We’re at a crossroads where technology and components were designed for 3G. We’d love, with the ISP and telecom provider, to move to 4G LTE at least as an interim to grow capacity and sizing and speeds.”
To compound the problems, he noted, some of the area’s infrastructure was built onto that of a publicly held telecommunications company (Ontera) that subsequently divested. That infrastructure is now in the hands of a for-profit company (Bell Aliant) and the contracts that preserved rates are ending. That’s raising prices significantly.
“We know that fibre to the home is the cheapest long-term viable approach when you factor in return on investments in decades, rather than a few years.” – Paul Ouimette, NEOnet
“Our model was to deliver,” he noted. “The model for northeastern Ontario has to change. It all has to do with choosing the best solutions for the geography and reality of the sizing of those communities. We know that fibre to the home is the cheapest long term viable approach when you factor in return on investments in decades, rather than a few years, and I think that’s the other model in this composition that we’ll have to consider.”
Severson’s challenges were demonstrated in her presentation – her audio often became so choppy she could not be understood at times. While she’s only seven minutes away from a large urban centre that gets 50/10, she’s lucky to get 15 Mbps service. To get 50/10 to 95% of her region, with 75% wired and the remaining fixed wireless, would cost between $500 million and $750 million; gigabit services would up the price to between $1.2 and $1.6 billion. Despite the huge cost, gig is the preferred option.
“One of our MPs said to us on one of our calls, ‘Why wouldn’t you just do the gig?’,” she said. “He said, ‘Is 50/10 going to be enough for you, or will you be back in five to 10 years saying it just doesn’t work? So would a gig fix those problems, and for a much longer period of time?’ And so that’s what we are now pursuing.”
The federal government’s national rural broadband plan, coming soon, will be $1 billion.
The Covid-19 work from home crisis has illustrated the needs. Some residents have told her they may have to sell their homes and move because connectivity is so bad that they can’t do their jobs from home.
“The perception is that rural residents don’t need the same type of access that you do in urban centers. I think it’s the complete opposite. We think rural residents would probably utilize what they can do with that type of access just as much if not more than our urban counterparts,” she concluded.
