Rebuild already planned
By Amanda Oye
LYTTON, B.C. – Following record-breaking temperatures approaching 50 degrees celsius, a wildfire that began last Wednesday has wreaked havoc on Lytton, B.C., destroying much of the village, including its communication infrastructure.
“Our fibre network is totally torched,” said Daniel Mundall of Lyttonnet in an interview Monday.
As we reported in a feature story in 2018, Lyttonnet is a community cable, wireless and internet provider that spearheaded an initiative to build a community-owned fibre optic network in 2014 with the help of local volunteers. This was a significant advancement, since many in the Lytton community still relied…
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LONDON, U.K. — While rural Canadians have seen slight improvements in average mobile download speeds over the last 12 months, the gap between rural users’ download speed experience has become more prominent compared to networks in large urban centres, according to the latest analysis from analytics company Opensignal.
Generally speaking, Opensignal says rural users on Bell, Rogers and Telus’ mobile networks experience average download speeds which are less than half than those of its users in large population centres (PCs) on all three carriers.
For its analysis, Opensignal compared the mobile network experience of rural users, which make up almost 20%…
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GATINEAU — The CRTC today announced it has approved recommendations made in a report submitted in October 2020 by the CRTC Interconnection Steering Committee’s (CISC) Emergency Services Working Group (ESWG), which now requires facilities-based wireless service providers to take steps to implement handset-based location technology in Canada by March 1, 2022.
With approximately 80% of 9-1-1 calls now being made on wireless devices, according to the Commission, wireless location information is critical when providing assistance to callers in emergency situations.
Advanced mobile location (AML) is a handset-based location protocol which can be used to find caller location for 9-1-1 calls made…
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Say letters telecoms sent to ISED in order to get funds
By Ahmad Hathout
OTTAWA – Rogers and Videotron have promised Innovation Canada they will implement several key policies that will speed up and cheapen access to subsidized support structures if granted money from the $2.75-billion Universal Broadband Fund.
The two companies propose to participate in frequent meetings of a co-ordination committee of owners of passive infrastructure; streamlining and accelerating permit reviews, administrative processes and contracts; and establishing a “dig-once” policy, whereby other carriers will be able to lay their fibre down at the same time that their own infrastructure is being…
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To be an open-access network
BROOKS, AB — Brooks, Alberta, announced this week it has reached an agreement with a consortium led by Community Network Partners, a subsidiary of Crown Capital Partners Inc., for the construction and operation of a next-generation, fibre-optic broadband network capable of delivering 10-gigabits-per-second service to every household and business in the community.
The southern Alberta city of 14,400, which is about halfway between Medicine Hat and Calgary, will invest $5.3 million in the project and will own the backbone network. Community Network Partners will invest $15.7 million to connect residents and business locations to the backbone,…
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QUÉBEC CITY — For a rural broadband project costing $127.72 million, Videotron will receive a combined amount of $121 million in funding from the Canadian and Quebec governments, as part of the Canada-Quebec Operation High Speed initiative, to deploy high-speed Internet services to 13,300 households in the Abitibi-Témiscaminigue and Nord-du-Québec regions by September 2022.
The announcement was made today by the federal and provincial governments who have committed to providing $826.3 million in combined funding through the Operation High Speed program, first announced in March, to ensure connectivity for 150,000 underserved homes in rural Quebec by September of next year….
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Want faster, cheaper piracy measures
By Ahmad Hathout
OTTAWA – The country’s largest broadcasters and telecoms want new copyright legislation to include provisions that give the courts the ability to order website-blocking, prevent the CRTC from overruling blocking orders, and to expand authority over other intermediaries to choke off infringers.
Bell, Rogers, Telus, Shaw, Cogeco, Quebecor, SaskTel, Eastlink, and the Canadian Communications System Alliance also want the legislation to reflect the courts’ ability to unilaterally order search engines to de-index infringing websites, social media platforms and to force hosts, like Cloudflare, to take down infringing services and not direct users to it,…
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CANADA’S ISPs ALWAYS want to perform well in PCMag’s analysis of the fastest speeds delivered to their customers.
The magazine regularly, with the help of Ookla and actual customers using its Speedtest, takes a look at the internet service providers across Canada to show who offers the fastest Internet service.
The upload and download speeds are given weighted scores and analyzed by PCMag according to a speed index (PCMag Speed Index or PSI). This year’s big winner was Beanfield Metroconnect, which notched huge performance gaps over its competition in Toronto.
When it comes to national providers however, Telus was the fastest.
“Last year,…
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Auction starts today
By Ahmad Hathout
OTTAWA – The strings attached to the federal government’s 3.5 GHz spectrum, whose auction beginning today will repurpose portions of it for mobile wireless use, include a speed-to-deployment component that complements federal policy to accelerate connectivity throughout the country by the end of the decade.
Winners of the auction, which Innovation Canada said will take “several weeks,” will have to deploy the spectrum largely within the 2030 timeframe for which the federal government hopes to provide access to all Canadians to high-speed internet.
While the focus is largely on what the 3.5 GHz spectrum will do for…
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By Ahmad Hathout
GATINEAU – Like deja vu, the immediate impact of a major decision by the CRTC has unfurled in the days immediately following — but the reactions are the reverse of what happened in August 2019.
When the CRTC that summer decided to slash the bulk internet rates smaller providers pay for large network access – and make the rates retroactive so some serious back pay was supposed to go to those independents – the large telecoms announced cuts to investments, including in rural areas. Smaller providers, rejoicing, immediately slashed retail internet prices.
Following Thursday’s decision to go back…
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