By Ahmad Hathout
ONTARIO – The Ontario government announced Thursday it has launched a request for qualifications for a series of reverse auctions it hopes will set in motion its goal to connect the entire province to high-speed Internet by 2025.
The qualification screening is intended to ensure bidders meet specified criteria in the hopes of facilitating a rapid build with minimal failure.
Internet service providers will need to register at www.merx.com, a press release said. After qualifying submissions are made, the government will make a shortlist of candidates who will be invited to respond to a request for proposals on their build projects to participate in the auctions, it added.
Before the reverse auctions and $4 billion in funds were announced in July, an infrastructure ministry spokesperson told Cartt.ca that bidders must be licensed with the CRTC and that the government will prefer those that have an existing track record of project building success. He also told this publication no special consideration will be made to smaller ISPs or to any particular communities.
“Ontario is now one of the few jurisdictions in Canada with its own comprehensive and proactive plan to achieve 100 per cent connectivity,” the Thursday press release said. “In the coming months, the government plans to announce the results of the reverse auctions, along with additional details on how it will help ensure every region in Ontario has access to high-speed internet by the end of 2025.”
The provincial government said the reverse auctions will take place in defined geographic areas, calling it a “new and innovative procurement process.” (Winning reverse auction bids go to the telecom that asks for the least amount of subsidy from the government for their builds.)
The funds will include at least $600 million from the $2.75 billion federal Universal Broadband Fund and could also leverage loans from the federal government’s Infrastructure Bank.
The Ontario government said as many as 700,000 households in Ontario, comprising 1.4 million people, lack access to high-speed Internet or have no Internet connection at all.
The province has ushered in a number of funding programs and laws intended to accelerate broadband expansion in the province. Its Building Broadband Faster Act, which came into force in April, empowers the minister of infrastructure to bypass municipalities or utilities and allow Internet service providers to put their broadband equipment on poles owned by those utilities and on municipal rights of way.
Other programs include Improving Connectivity for Ontario (ICON), which was introduced last year, and in this year’s budget, the government committed an additional $2.8 billion for broadband.
