OTTAWA – While it may be a stretch to suggest that Canada’s glaring lack of a digital economy strategy is directly damaging our economy, witnesses to Parliament’s Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology this week noted that there are places reaping significant benefits from just such a plan, albeit on a regional basis.
Catherine Middleton, a professor at Ryerson University and the Ted Rogers School of Management, pointed to the success of Chattanooga, Tenn., as an example that Canada and Canadian cities should strive to achieve. There, the municipal utility has built out a Gigabit per second broadband network, she said during here appearance before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology.
“What that has done is it’s become a huge hub for regional development. Companies across the U.S. are moving into Chattanooga because this broadband connectivity is there,” she said. “It’s very clear that the entire local government recognized the value of this connectivity as an economic development initiative. So it wasn’t just ‘hey we want faster broadband so people can watch YouTube,’ it was if we built this network at this speed in this community, business will move into this community.”
(Ed note: There, infrastructure is not just viewed as roads, bridges and sewers, but includes broadband, or infrastructure can deliver an intelligent workforce and citizenry.)
There are some examples of that type of localized success here in Canada, said Middleton, highlighting Fredericton NB. The city owns a fibre ring that is used to provide bandwidth for municipal services. Excess capacity is then provided to citizens.
These cases serve to illustrate the potential that a broader digital strategy could deliver, but the question remains whether this type of model is to be replicated in other municipalities or in Canada as a whole. “Clearly there are opportunities to build industrial parks, build networks, build regions that will draw with… this high speed symmetrical fibre connectivity business into that,” she said. “The question I don’t have an answer for is why aren’t we seeing more of those types of networks being built out in Canadian communities. We’re seeing some evidence of that, but it’s not across the board.”
Avvey Peters, VP of external relations with Waterloo’s Communitech (a government of Ontario-funded regional hub which helps tech companies commercialize their product), argued that private sector led partnerships are a good way of getting sufficiently high-bandwidth and affordable broadband into municipalities, pointing to a Google’s fibre to the home initiative in the U.S. as an example.
“Just as roads and rail are vital to the health of manufacturing, so is fast and affordable connectivity considered critical to the health of digital companies and the technology industry,” she said referring to an overall theme emerging from a consultation with technology community stakeholders in Stratford, Ont. “Companies like Fibernetix with its Fongo application and Google with its fibre-to-the-home project in Kansas City are showing how market solutions can address both affordability and connection speed.”
Good connectivity, Peters said, is required by all companies, not just those directly involved in the digital media and information and communications technologies sectors. Communitech operates a digital media centre in Waterloo Region and one its most recent members is Canadian Tire. “They’re there because they see a huge opportunity in e-retail and e-commerce and they’re trying to take advantage of the business opportunities that connectivity will provide. That’s just one example of where we see productivity gains that can be made by companies that are able to maximize that opportunity,” she added.
Communitech held consultations in a number of Canadian communities to determine what stakeholders wanted when it comes to broadband and connectivity. Overall, companies believe investments in connectivity are very important for the future. “We’ve been hearing that ubiquitous, affordable, high-speed broadband is a critical investment in Canada’s future. We’ve heard that connectivity is a key factor in new business creation and growth,” Peters said.
The current federal Conservative government has been promising a national digital economy strategy for years (Industry Minister Christian Paradis told Cartt.ca last month that it is still not done). Consultations were held in 2010, shepherded by then Industry Minister Tony Clement. But on the eve of the strategy’s release, the federal election and subsequent cabinet shuffle sent Clement elsewhere with the strategy pushed to the back burner. All the while, our peer nations are moving ahead. The U.S. instituted a national broadband plan back in 2010, the European Union has its pan-European digital agenda and the Australian government is building a national broadband network.
Middleton notes that if the Australian plans comes to fruition as “originally conceived, it should provide a Gigabit per second of service to 93%” of that country’s population.
An Industry Committee study on broadband wouldn’t be complete without discussion on the deployment of services to under-served rural regions of the country. However, the committee heard, perhaps for the first time, that this is no longer a question of the rural-urban digital divide. Xplornet Communications noted that its satellite and terrestrial broadband network covers 100% of the Canadian population and next week will be launching new suite of services offering 10 Mbps upload and 1 Mbps download speeds.
Where the divide remains though, is between low- and high-income households, regardless of where they are. Middleton noted in her opening remarks while 97% of the top income quartile have broadband access, only 54% in the bottom income quartile do.
“So we still have a digital divide and this is a challenge that we have to address,” she said. “We need to understand better what is and isn’t driving people to use broadband networks. Then if it’s part of our national vision that everybody has access to broadband we need to start thinking about how we can encourage more people to make use of these services and to obtain them in the first place.”
(Ed note: As we have mentioned in Cartt.ca repeatedly, Canada has no vision or leadership yet apparent on this issue while those around us have long since put plans in place to deliver broadband to those who can’t afford it. In the U.S., both the FCC and the cable and telecom companies, have called delivering broadband and computers to the poor “critical” to that nation’s future. Disappointingly, we have yet to see action in Canada from either this industry or government.)
