THE BROOKE TELECOM HEADQUARTERS in Inwood, Ont. is also the local Canada Post office. We’re hard-pressed to think of many other such arrangements as quintessentially small-town.
Inwood (a village in the municipality of Brooke-Alvinston, pop. 2,500) is about halfway between the far larger centres of London and Sarnia, but when you step outside the broadband provider’s headquarters/post office, just about all you can see are farmer’s fields and a handful of homes. Yet, it provides big-city speeds and connectivity to many of those homes – and barns – to say nothing of the businesses in and around them.
Those who choose to live in rural regions still want modern living – and broadband connectivity is acknowledged as the primary driver for delivering that to homes far and wide. No longer do citizens have the patience to do without, or wait for certain things just because they live on a Rural Route and not an Boulevard. People “don’t care where they are and think ‘I should get the same services whether I’m out in the middle of Brooke Township on a farm, or whether I’m in downtown London. It should be exactly the same’,” said Geoff Greening, Brooketel’s general manager, in an interview in his office.
As well, “from an economic development standpoint, if we don’t have those types of services in a smaller community, how do we retain youth? It’s a problem.”
The company, a co-operative owned by its members whose history dates back to 1911, offers broadband speeds and packages competitive with big-city providers (with better pricing than some and with no bandwidth caps), digital television and home phone, while also acting as a Bell Mobility reseller (with even a couple of cell towers of its own, filling some rural gaps – including in Inwood itself, pictured).
Brooketel has close to 2,000 wired customers spread over several hundred square kilometres. Approximately 1,500 homes are in its traditional SILEC exchanges (with 40% fibre to the home penetration overall so far, said Greening) and the rest are in competitive communities outside of its home regions to which the co-op has expanded such as Watford and Alvinston. Both of those “larger centres” are Brooketel fibre-to-the-home projects where the company competes in Alvinston with Eastlink, which has the triple play but not FTTH. In Watford, Brooketel’s foremost 
competition is Execulink, a fellow independent. “They’re a pretty good competitor quite frankly, so we have customers that switch back and forth between the two of us and we wish we had higher penetration numbers, but that’s part of the nature of it,” explained Greening.
Bell is also a competitor in both communities, but has no broadband on offer in either.
“We’re investing our members’ money (by building beyond its traditional exchanges) and getting a return for them out of it. The idea is that these are longer-term investments. We’re not looking at a two-year time frame for return on investment. When I worked at Eastlink, it was pretty key that we had to have a quicker return on our investment, but we’re a little longer scope. I guess it just comes with the nature of being in a rural area as well. Farmers don’t buy farms to make a profit in two years either,” he added. “We already had fibre around (Watford and Alvinston), so it made sense to go in.”
Now, partly because of the fact there is real, fibre broadband, Alvinston is seeing growth. “The mayor is ecstatic about it,” added Greening. “We’re seeing investment in that community for the first time in a long time. There’s actually an apartment building being built there. We’re not talking a (Toronto) sized apartment building, we’re talking a small thing, but that’s new real estate investment. We’re actually seeing three or four new businesses opening up on main street, and these buildings have been shuttered and closed up for quite a while.”
“There are people in our area on our fibre network, on our DSL network, and they’re able to get full-time job with nice benefits, and work from home.” – Geoff Greening, Brooke Telecom
Many of the folks who live in these towns and villages or who have moved there recently have similar stories, said Greening (as have some of the others we’ve interviewed for our series on The Independents). Tired of the pace or the real estate prices or the grind of larger cities, they pick up and move – but they still need to be close enough to their job, which for Brooketel’s customers often is in London (65 kms from Alvinston) or Sarnia (64 kms). Others are born and raised there but still want fast broadband.
For some though, the job can come with them into the countryside, thanks to the connectivity. For example, Greening points to the 2013 decision by the Marriott hotel chain to close its Sarnia call centre, but retain staff to work from their homes instead, some of whom are on the Brooketel system. “There’s people in our area on our fibre network, on our DSL network, and they’re able to get full-time job with nice benefits, and work from home.”
“We’ll actually configure custom routers for them and do other extra things because we have an older population and there are not a lot of IT companies out here able to do some of that work.” – Greening
As with most independents, Brooketel prides itself on personal customer service. It’s important to do things right for people you’ll run into at the grocery store, minor hockey game, or at church – especially when they have just come home from Best Buy in London with a smart TV and don’t know how to make it work. “We go beyond your standard customer service,” added Greening (right). “We’ll actually configure custom routers for them and do other
extra things because we have an older population and there are not a lot of IT companies out here able to do some of that work – so we end up doing that kind of thing for our customers as well.”
Despite all the work Brooketel has done and can do, there remains a prominent role for government to play when it comes to serving the rural populace and Greening is hopeful the recently established SWIFT (SouthWestern Integrated Fibre Technology) Network will help. However, while SWIFT looks to be concentrating on backbone first with its $280 million in funding from the federal, provincial and local governments, it’s the last mile where companies like Brooketel need more help, said the GM.
“We’ve already built the backbone,” he explained. “I mean, I’ve got fiber that runs from Grand Bend down to Alvinston, and has a ring in the middle. What more do you need in this area in terms of backbone infrastructure? I don’t see it.
“(The last mile) is the most expensive, hardest part. The (SWIFT) business model is that they’re hoping, and I question it, that the revenue they generate from the backbone will help fund the last mile, but I have a hard time seeing that. When I look at going down a country road to grab five customers and it’s going to cost me $300,000 to serve those five customers, does that make a lot of economic sense? Probably not, even from my perspective, let alone Bell and others,” he continued.
“Look, we would like to expand services in this community, and we can do it very efficiently compared to anybody else… A multi-million-dollar program is not what we need. We need pockets of money to serve pockets of people and that can actually pay huge, huge dividends,” Greening added.
“The problem is that a lot of the projects they look at are really big while the problems we deal with are very small and they still need funding… I don’t have millions of dollars to go out and build networks everywhere, but I’ve got lots of little problems and I can solve them very efficiently for very little dollars.”
