QUEBEC – When the Quebec provincial government needed to make decisions about which ISPs would receive funding from the Canada-Quebec Operation High Speed program, Gilles Bélanger (above), parliamentary assistant to the premier for high-speed Internet in Quebec, said they approached it like a game of Risk.
Responsible for making sure all households in Quebec have access to high-speed Internet (defined by the CRTC as 50 megabytes, minimum) by the end of September 2022, Bélanger and his team of 20 took out a map and looked at which ISPs were already providing services and where.
While the game of Risk is about the complete domination of the map by one player, Bélanger’s strategy is more about specific ISPs dominating specific areas of the province.
Based on this strategy, he and his team approached individual ISPs already operating in areas near those they determined need service. There was no general application system in which all ISPs could participate. There were some areas where there were two or three possible ISPs, in which case each of the ISPs was asked what they would charge and were told they would be expected to cover 100% of the area if they were awarded funding.
Only ISPs operating services nearby under- or unserved areas were considered for any of the funding. “I don’t want to subsidize Videotron, as an example to go with, … to pull a fibre for 25 kilometers where there’s another ISP and connect those 25,” Bélanger said. “I will ask that other ISP, listen, can you connect this 25?” he said. So then one ISP will then provide their costs, which will be compared to other ISP’s submissions, “which normally will cost more because they have to pull so much, so many kilometers [of fibre] to reach a territory.”
The intention is to stay away from creating competition. “I agree that competition is good, but… I want that to happen without our help,” said Bélanger.
The ISPs ultimately chosen to receive funding did so with a major caveat: They each need to take inventory of the areas for which they received funding to serve within 120 days to confirm for the province where there is no service.
“The funding is based on an estimated number of connections and… they have 120 days to do the inventory, after that, they come back to us and they could say you forgot 25. Okay. Where are you located? They’re located there. Then we know who’s around and who’s the player,” said Bélanger.
Because of this inventory process, the funding amounts announced to date are not necessarily going to be the final numbers. Based on the inventory reports required, the amount of funding the ISPs receive and which ISPs receive funding at all may change. “It can go lower or higher. And also, part of the contract, the deployment that they will do, there’s a rate that they need to achieve per month. If they get below that rate, I can pull them out of the region. I can ask someone else to connect [that region],” he explained.
Another consequence of the way Operation High Speed funding recipients were chosen is that a significant amount of the funding, as announced to date, has gone to large ISPs, which, as Cartt.ca previously reported, has angered smaller independent operators. Jay Thomson, CEO of the Canadian Communication Systems Alliance, told us he had been assured by the federal government that monies would be distributed equitably amongst ISPs of varying sizes and types.
However, while half of the $826.3 million Quebec program’s funding comes from the feds’ Universal Broadband Fund, Operation High Speed is run by the province as one part of its $1.3 billion plan to bring high-speed Internet to 100% of the province, so decisions about how to use that funding have been made by Bélanger and his team as part of Quebec’s broader goals.
“Telecommunications is federal, but we decided to build our own plan,” Bélanger said. They did so because they believed the federal government’s “schedule was not adequate,” he said. The federal government’s program was planned with a 2025-27 timeline in mind, whereas the Quebec government aims to provide 100% high speed coverage across the province by the end of September 2022.
Bélanger has emphasized small ISPs have not been left out of Quebec’s high-speed Internet plan entirely. There are more funding announcements to come – he still has around $300 million of funding to announce – most of which probably go to small ISPs, as “their presence in the rural area is very important for me,” Bélanger said.
He is expected to make an announcement later this week and another one in the fall.
Photo borrowed from coalitionavenirquebec.org
