Around the world, a number of governments are using economic stimulus programs as an excuse to drive government funding of next generation broadband infrastructure. In April, Australia announced plans to spend $43 billion (around $40 billion in Canadian funds) on a new national broadband network. That money, to be spent over the next eight years, is to develop a network capable of delivering 100Mbps service to 90 per cent of the population, and the rest of the country will get served by next generation wireless and satellite service.
In Canada, many have criticized the government for only setting aside $225 million for rural and remote broadband acceleration programs. Well, we believe that this more conservative approach is appropriate. Canada is already ahead of where Australia hopes to be in eight years.
According the CRTC’s 2009 Communications Monitoring Report, 94 per cent of Canadian households can already get a terrestrial broadband service. About 80 per cent of us can be reached by cable modem service; 84 per cent can get DSL. Most of Canada’s cable companies have now launched DOCSIS 3.0 based service, with data rates up to 100 Mbps already commercially available.
The rest of us are within reach of fixed wireless and satellite. Most Canadians have access to multiple broadband networks: twisted pair, coaxial cable, fixed and mobile wireless, and satellite. Canadians benefit from having among the world’s greatest diversity of facilities based competition.
The private sector is delivering more service, to more Canadians, with competitive choice of suppliers, without government intervention and without taxpayer cash and without us having to wait eight years.
A question remains how should the money be spent to stimulate higher rates of adoption?
Improving broadband adoption requires a focus on more than just building more terrestrial availability. Customers have to see the value of subscribing.
Everyone who wants broadband internet in Canada can have it – but at a price. Some provinces, such as Nova Scotia, have already developed affordable wireline based access to 100 per cent of the population, but many Nova Scotia residents are still not subscribing.
Increasing broadband adoption requires more than just affordable supply; consumers need computers and enhanced digital literacy in order to stimulate demand.
So far, our national focus has been on the supply side: how can we help make broadband service in rural and remote areas more affordable and accessible?
We need to turn our national attention on examining those factors which are inhibiting demand: how do we convince more users – urban and rural – to go on-line?
Roberta Fox, regular columnist for CDN Now said as technology professionals who lives and works out of Mount Albert, Ont., a rural area North east of Toronto, we agree with Mark’s comments.
Yes, we have diversity of multiple high speed telecommunications services available in various parts of the country and not all services are available in all areas of Canada, but in fact we are doing excellent in the narrow highly populated band near the border and very well over the rest of our vast sparsely populated country. One of the things we have observed from talking with a wide variety of people throughout our rural community is that many people complain to us about the high rural cost of high speed, compared to urban subscribers.
We usually try to educate them as to why there are the cost differences from the industry. We also try to help them understand what the social and business benefits can be for them of having reliable broadband internet access, (transportation cost offsets, running home based businesses, access to information for education purposes, etc.). This is usually an eye opening experience for most of them, as they haven’t thought about spending money this way before. It’s hard to miss the fact that these same people have no trouble justifying a similar expense for Satellite TV with all the additional channels and features.
We encourage our various government departments and the telecom industry to invest more in developing programs to educate customers on how to calculate their own ROIs for paying for high speed Internet services?
As always, we welcome your thoughts and feedback on our publications. Contact me at [email protected] or 905.473.3369 x 1001, or 1.866.FOX.GROUP.
