By Ahmad Hathout
OTTAWA – Innovation Canada and the CRTC have released an advance notice today stating they intend to award a $1.5-million contract to a broadband measurement company to collect performance data on fixed-wireless speed claims of up to 50 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload – the federal objective.
In the notice, ISED said it is seeking only data from wireless service providers claiming to provide Internet service of “up to” 50/10 to households over wireless signals for verification purposes. The contractor will test performance by metric, time, location, service plan, distance to service towers and technology, according to the notice, and the job will need to be completed within 12 months of award (with the work expected to take place up to Sept. 31, 2023).
ISED said it intends to award the contract to SamKnows, a United Kingdom-based broadband measurement company that has done work for the CRTC and for the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. The advance notice is intended to provide competing providers with the opportunity to demonstrate they can also do the work before it is formally contracted to the favoured supplier. The deadline to demonstrate that case is July 25.
The winning supplier will be required to measure the percentage of time actual download speeds are “meeting or exceeding” subscribed download speeds and the percentage of time download speeds are at 50 Mbps and upload speeds are at 10 Mbps and above. Correlative data will also be collected, such as distance from towers, weather events and foliage (where signal penetration loss can be identified).
The supplier will be required to work with ISED and the CRTC to identify which wireless service providers should be tested based on the number of customers, revenue, and/or total coverage of their geographical footprint – with about 30 areas and WSP combinations to evaluate, the notice said.
The supplier will then be required to identify the service tiers to be measured, work with the WSPs to retrieve information for the project, identify the frequency (number of times a day and when) of data collection, recruit volunteer households and work to install measurement devices, address privacy and security requirements, and provide the ability to download the data from a web portal.
A final report will be made using the findings.
This will be the third such test and report for the CRTC, which has commissioned SamKnows for its Measuring Broadband Canada Project.
“Our research indicates that, SamKnows is the only supplier currently offering a comprehensive solution including hardware testing of broadband performance for national scope targeted users, including management of testing agents, schedules and users,” the notice said.
The notice adds that if the intended award is challenged, timelines with hardware development “would be significant and would hinder capacity to get the broadband performance results in a timely manner.
“In addition, the costs associated with hardware development are unknown and could be quite significant, whereas the SamKnows costs are comparable to those of previous contracts” with the CRTC.
Those first two tests were conducted on fixed broadband performance and produced reports in 2016 and 2020, respectively.
In those tests, volunteer households used a device called a whitebox, which monitors the home’s modem or router for performance – including speed, latency and web access times – when no one is using the Internet. The first test had just under 5,000 whiteboxes, while the second had just under 3,500. All major internet service providers participated, including Bell, Rogers, Telus, Shaw, Cogeco, and Videotron.
