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Alberta, Canada Goes Broadband -- By 2004
jasonu writes: "According to this article in The Calgary Herald, every town in Alberta, Canada with either a hospital, a school, a government office or a library will be getting wired for high speed Internet access by the end of 2004. I will finally get broadband!!" Though the article says this will be an "optical fiber network," it doesn't detail the mechanics of it, nor expected data capabilities -- but for $40 a month (Canadian), anything that sounds even remotely "high speed" sounds pretty impressive.
Bill - aka taniwha
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Bill - aka taniwha
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Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
This is what I love about Canada: getting all these great things handed to us for far under cost, if not altogether free!
Education, health care, even food and shelter (if you can't afford it yourself). What a generous government to give so freely of its own money! I sure wouldn't give my money away like that!
I look forward to the inevitable day when our wonderful government gives us everything we need, and none of us need to work. I'm definitely voting Liberal!
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...Canada has the best internet access in the world.
Really.
Especially BC, where I am. DSL is 1.5 megabit and cable is the same. Everyone can get cable if you live in a city (i mean, if your city has cable).
Canada has the highest percentage of broadband users per capita of internet users in the world.
This isn't huge news. It's just cool that Telus is finally putting it's huge resources to work.
I'm hoping for fiber to the house by 2010.
Browsing at three right now I see at least one post stating "Why do I have to pay for this?". Well, it seems that in terms of a long term goal the governement can actually make a profit from providing cheap high speed internet access to the masses. The other reason they chose to do this is to give their province a head start into the communications market, which means big bucks for everyone, you can't knock a gov't for trying man. :-)
This post made while intoxicated so no spell cheakers please
Lemure, wtf! Don't you mean Lemur?
I agree with you on a few points, but only in a limited way.
You see, I don't look at this as givine 'net connections to a bunch of people who will never use them.
This about when rural areas first got paved roads. I doubt many people had cars(after all, there were no roads, so no cars), and yet it made a profound difference not only in their communities, but to the nation as a whole(not that I'm saying good changes, by the way). All of a sudden, a farmer could feed more than people within 20km of his house - he could feed people 200-300kms away!
There's also a few things you may not realize.
a) Farming is actually an incredibly technical occupation. The amounts of data that a farmer generates in one year is probably more than an an average two-three story office building.
b) There isn't much to do out in the boonies. While farmers usually enjoy their work, their kids might not. This will immediately increase their quality of living. Also, the two absolutely brilliant people I met became brilliant studying on the farm they grew up on - their was nothing else to do.
Dave
'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
And then they got this idea that they could make the rebates conditional on use of porn filters (bill currently pending in the house). Apparently, if the government takes your money and then gives it back to you, that gives them permission to control the way you use the money. (okay, that's a big simplification, but it's somewhat true. The struggle is really between federal and local control, and their blind insistence that filters work)
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Ugh, I apologize for the spelling and bad grammar. It's rather late here.
Dave
'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
If you didn't pay income tax in 1999, you could go to the Alberta Gov't website, fill in a form, then they send you a Tax Rebate form, you fill it out, then send it in. Pay more attention to the news. :P
I didn't pay income tax in 1999, yet I'm getting the money because I followed instructions posted in the newspaper.
It is everyone over 16 that gets it, regardless if you paid or not.
The US dollar (worth about 50% more than the Canadian one) is definitly a plus, but not as big as one as you'd think. In my experience, cost-of-living is generally higher in the US, especially when it comes to rent (by far my biggest expenditure). Something that costs $20 in USD often costs $20 CD as well, erasing a lot of the currency differences. Of course, this depends a lot on where you live, and things imported from other countries may not follow this rule. Your results may very. :-)
Where the currency difference helps a LOT is when you send US$ back to Canada, as I am doing making student loan payments... HUGE help there.
The salary difference is a much bigger story. American companies trip all over themselves giving skilled Canadians fat paychecks, and often stock. Canadians in the US tend to be well-educated, hard-working, and have good attitudes (all the benefits of foreign labor without the "disadvantages" of foreign languages, sad but true). If you can perform a task, they'll pay for it. In contrast, a lot of the companies in Canada tie their payscales to "experience" (number of years worked). If you're new to the industry, expect to be making a lot less compared to your American counterparts. This is starting to change somewhat, but it's still prevalent.
This means that for a young recent grad like myself, the US is a much better place to work in, financially speaking. As my student loans shrink with the weak C$ and my number of years of experience in the industry increase, the option of coming back to Canada to work looks ever more attractive. I'll have to take a pay cut when I come back, but I'll live with it. :-)
Well that was part of the merger with bct (bc's former telephone monopoly). They have recently moved large sections back to Calgary and Edmonton.
Hehehe :) You're right - the system will have to be replace piece by piece over time. They do that with roads now, though. And it's EXPENSIVE.
I'd argue that it will be cheaper with this "broadband network" than with roads. After all, we'll probably be using fiber for a long time to come, and it hasn't changes much since its inception. That's what's really driving the cost of this network up - laying the fiber.
After the fiber is laid, the rest of the costs are more reasonable. And, assuming the fiber holds out, to upgrade the network you only have to upgrade the nodes/towns that need it. The hardware won't be too expensive either, I bet.
Dave
'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
That was a poorly researched /. response.
The program announced in the story is a provincial intiative for rural Alberta and, ASFAIK, not part of the Federal programs you mention. A look through the Alberta government Supernet Site does not reveal any connection to the Canarie project. This one is an all Alberta project using Alberta seed money.
FWIW, the Liberal Red Book III still contains unfullfilled promises from 1993's Red Book I. I don't put a lot faith that anything in the book will actually become policy.
You can't buy a product that doesn't exist and given the cost of laying fibre across the province (Americans, check a map and note just how much land area Alberta covers, then note there are only 3 million people in the province and 2/3 of those live in the two major cities and the corridor between them) the Telcos aren't interested in doing it without a major investor. The Alberta government has decided to play the role of investor.
When comes down to it, this program is very NOT socialist. No private corporations will be harmed and the final product will be privately owned. The government is just a customer who wants high speed access to its offices across the province and has $200 million to drop on it.
But if you want a big fat pipe now and your just an ordinary consumer in rural Alberta you'll have to move to the city where we've had broadband for 4 years.
Population of Alberta: ~2,700,000
Population of Rural Alberta: ~540,000
Population of Urban Alberta: ~2,160,000
We can probably except that %25 percent of Alberta's population will subscribe to the service(a large porton of rural areas, as well as a smaller portion of urban areas).
So, we've got 25% of Alberta's population(25% = 675,000 people).
675,000 * $40/month = $27,000,000 a MONTH.
So, how long do you think it'll take them to make up the $300,000,000 initial investment? Seems like a damned fine setup to me.
Dave
'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
I'm just trying to sell T-shirts here.
It doesn't pay to check facts when you want a +5 funny! The moderators don't read the article, so why should I?
Now, go buy a "What Would Jeebus Do?" mousepad, to compensate for interfering with my tasteless, yet ineffective commercial exploitation of slashdot.
(Anyway, Alberta's the "freak province" with heavily taxed oil wealth; if prices went up much more, they could put every legal citizen in the whole province on welfare and break even by taxing foreign oil extractors. It's to Canada as Canada is to the world: a huge bundle of natural resource wealth with a tiny population that can get away with practically any ridiculous economic policy by just selling off those resources in raw form to foreigners. We're the feudal nobility of the world, living high by taking a share of the profits from any use of the land, which is conveniently defended for us by our friendly, uncovetous neighbor, the world's greatest military power, which has it's own racket. Which, incidentally, is why you need a Jeebus coffee mug and a matching Jeebus sweater; welfare doesn't include GHz processors and cable modems yet.)
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This type of thing IS happening in the US, but only on the level of local governments. For example, in Tacoma, WA, the city got fed up waiting for TCI / AT&T / whatever they are these days to get their act together. The city went ahead and wired its own cable network. Result? Excellent broadband service, without the moronic @home hassles, and only 20 bucks a month. In fact, because of this, AT&T had to reduce their rates in this area or face losing a crapload of customers.
Contrast that with, say Redmond, where there is DSL, but no cable available. No competition. The price is -at least- 40 a month, and that's for bare bones service.
The downside, is that wiring an entire city is a pretty massive undertaking if you aren't building on existing infrastructure. For one the size of Tacoma, it is feasible with a couple years of work. For one like, say, Los Angeles, it would be a nightmare. And to expand such a proposition to the national level -- well, it ain't gonna happen.
Don't forget, the cost of wiring isn't just the cables and power. You have to deal with buildings (high-rises are probably even worse). You have to tear up roads and do things that may affect traffic. And while you're at it, make sure you don't affect any other service. Very costly.
Frankly, if you want broadband NOW, you should just move to a new residence. If you're looking for the better long term solution, then who knows - maybe they'll do something like Tacoma did. If you live in a small-medium sized town with a lot of tech professionals, you might be able to get some petitions and influence the local govt. A long shot, of course, but an interesting prospect.
Best regards,
SEAL
I've seen the jokeish pile of shit cable modem service that is available to me here in British Columbia for $40. The service is horrible- they told me they support my connect- as long as they can "ping my modem", they are satisfied and 100% supported, the tech people clueless (Tier 1 does not know the difference between TCP and ICMP) and the bandwidth cap intolerable.
So, this is what I get for fourty dollars a month Canadian? I'd pay triple that for good service, a consistent connect to Quake servers, and the ability to talk to someone who knows networking when I phone tech support.
One of the most killer moments was when I complained to the tech support guys about the crappy connects I got in Quake, to the tune of five or six packet loss phone jack icons a minute (yes, I troubleshooted every last variable other than my cable modem) and in order to get me off the phone, they told me to take a screenshot of the lag, and to send it to support@home.com. So, I took a picture of the game not moving.
..
Michael Labbe
Cable modem service (Shaw @Home or Videon @Home) or xDSL is available in Alberta in these places:
Calgary (including suburbs)
Edmonton (including suburbs)
Red Deer (including suburbs)
Lethbridge
Fort McMurray
Hinton
Population is about 3 million, and the cities above comprise about 80%. So add the other 400 000 in that this story is about, and you'd be pretty hard pressed to find a place without good net access.
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Once the fiber is in, $40 should do it fine. $40 already is the normal fee in the cities in Alberta for cable or ADSL.
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Isn't there still a large salary difference between what a software engineer can make in the US vs Canada? With a bit of experience it's very easy to make $70-80K+ in the US, or a lot more if you're a contracter. How easy would it be to make the same (say $120K CAN) in Canada? I'm not talking top salaries, but rather what a typical experienced guy can expect...
Agreed, there may be other advantages to living in Canada, but financially it seems a loss.
Mind you, "one of the best systems in the world" doesn't mean "best possible system". All rich countries have extremely regulated healthcare, so there are no real-world examples to contrast with.
For example, the American system isn't actually any better just because they pretend it's a free market, it's so absurdly overregulated that there's no room for profitable price reduction (however they reduce quality of service with profitable spending reduction), and the "insurance" system is practically equivalent to a tax-supported system (hired central management isn't any smarter than elected central management). But they at least let the extremely rich pay for operations that are too expensive for the general population. These early adopters fund a lot of research and development.
We don't give enough credit for the progress of medicine to developments in the USA. It scares me to think that they might be adopting something like our system soon, as it could really hurt the whole world's hospitals. What would MRI prices be without those crazy rich Yankees having their pets scanned?
What really bugs me is all the talk about how we mustn't allow private hospitals and "two-tier health care". It's not like people who can afford private health care can't afford plane tickets! They just go to other countries (mostly the USA) when they want treatment that the government won't pay for. What would be so wrong about letting them do it here, and keep their money in the country?
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Farming is an extremely high-tech business these days. Check out Trimble, the first site in a Google search for "farming GPS."
Farmers are using sophisticated soil-sampling quality testing, with GPS, to determine fertilizer spreads. The GPS is used to mark the sample location and generate a "map" of the field... and the GPS is used to control the mix of fertilizer *as* it is being spread.
GPS is also used for yield monitoring, during harvest: volume and moisture content. Why is one area more productive than another? The soil/fertilizer/weather/etc data is reviewed and analysed, and plans made to improve yield the following year.
Some farms use GPS with insect infestation data to perform variable crop spraying. The most sophisticated systems mix the pesticide on-the-wing: concentration dependent on infestation level.
How about variable-rate planting? Overcrowding is ruinous in poor-yielding sections. Plant fewer seeds there, and save money. Variable-depth tilling: monitor the hardpan depth and till only deep enough to crack it.
Variable-rate irrigation will make a fortune for its inventor, particularly in water-poor states like California.
And so on. The farming business is as high-tech as one's imagination... satellite imagery mapping out stressed crops, so one doesn't need to sample all 4000 acres to locate the infestations? Why not!
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
The provincial Tories put this through, as far as I'm concerned, the only worthwhile government in this country. Finally a gov't with enough gonads to do something the people want, and in doing so set themselves up for flak from all those losers that have nothing better to do than complain.
Lorne Taylor? I thought that was Al Gore's title.
These comis are never tired of putting forth this transparent propaganda machine about how the government did this.. the government did that..
Get real man. The internet was invented by General Motors and Standard Oil, and no high speed venture will succeed unless they appoint Chainsaw Al to run it.
-- look, cheese ahoy!
You don't need to make $120K in Canada. You need to make $70-80K in Canada.
Things don't automatically cost 50% more just because they're sold in Canada.
It certainly isn't a financial loss of any calibre once one calculates in the costs of being in America.
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Just to clarify some of the points that people have been dancing around here:
1) In an area (x) times the size of Texas, we have
slightly less than three million people.
2) MOST of those people (~75%?) already have access to high speed internet connections, via ADSL or cable. (or if they're willing to pay, direct fibre connection to the CA*Net backbone)
3) This news is only interesting because it's getting high speed access to everyone else in the province. All of those people in Balzac, Beiseiker, and so on will have high speed when this is through.
That said, this is just another one of our Premier's pre-campaign sweeteners. Somehow throwing $300M at a company to do something they'd make money on anyways doesn't exactly go along with the philosophy of Mr. "cut government spending, privatise everything, and get me another %$$#& beer!" but it _does_ go along nicely with the idea of softening up the voters before officially calling an election. (especially when his strongest support has been rural)
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
It's not as if we don't have the funds for such an endeavor. A friend of mind crunched the numbers and figured that the cost of one aircraft carrier could put a computer on ever classroom desk of every school of every town, city, and state in this country (and we're in the processes of building a new one right now, right?).
Wiring the country for government subsidized broadband would be a lot cheaper than the aforementioned task. Grr...
Maybe I'm just bitter because my house sits in the middle of a DSLAM-lacking bubble.
And soon, no provincial income tax, either...that leaves us with about a 37% federal income tax (depending on your tax bracket) and 7% GST on all non-essential purchases. Granted, it's more tax than neccessary (thanks to a huge national debt) but it's relatively liveable.
This is a poorly researched /. story. It is, in fact, the entire country of Canada which is gaining a national fibre-optic network. information can be had here. If you read the site thouroughly, including the various white papers, you will see that the Canadian government has invested a large amount of money in the project. The aim is to create a national network by 2004. It's also a plan that Jean Chretien and Liberals are including as part of their platform in the upcoming election. Evidence can be found in what the Grits call Red Book III.
-- This sig is.
True... engineering technologies are exactly the same today as they were ten or twenty years ago. And roads don't need regular maintenance.... oh wait, no, never mind.
At least we've replaced all those old copper lines we used to have ten years ago, back when 28.8 seemed like a lot... oh wait, forget it.
:)
"Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental." -Slashdot
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure fiber could be considered broadband, depending on how its used.
AFAIK:
Broadband:
- Uses many signals over a single pipe to carry data.
Baseband:
- Uses a single signal to carry data over a pipe.
Now, if they use multiple colors of light for the transmission of data over the actual line, wouldn't that be true broadband?
Please correct me if I am wrong here.
But you can't run fiber to a helicopter!
Sure you can.
You just can't fly it very far...
Well, like all things the government does, there are tradeoffs :)
:) Hey, I'm on DSL right now(which is probably what the government is putting in), but I'd pay for cable if I could get it. The population density in my area is low enough that I'd probably *never* have speeds below DSL, but I'd often have speeds far surpassing it.
Why don't more private companies build highways in Canada? They're allowed to, I've checked it out and talked with a few high-ish ranking politicians and lawyers. Fact is, there isn't enough money to be made. People prefer medicore, traffic-laden yet FREE roads over nice and expensive ones.
I think the same might happen here - people will prefer the lowish-cost government internet access over more expensive commercial counterparts.
However, I also doubt that there will be no commercial competition. After all, this is one of the first government ISPs(here in Canada, anyways), and there are how many commerical ones?
Dave
'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Whine whine whine. Ever cosider the possibility that while you're skiing in Banff and run smack into a tree, fracturing your skull, the local hospital might just benefit from that network, and therefore you might just benefit?
At the very least, you could play Quake from your hospital bed...
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How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
I've long felt that governments who could afford it should start treating internet connectivity as another form of infrastructure. Like roads, water supply, and the rest, the internet is probably going to become extremely ubiquitous. Frankly, I don't trust any commercial entity with that sort of responsibility. At least governments can in some ways be held accountable.
Governments shouldn't have to do things like split big monopolies up - they should never have become monopolies in the first place. With the government hooking up its populace, you know you will always have an alternative. And, if for some reason the entire venture becomes "unprofitable", no politician is going to shut down the program after people have gotten used to it. They'll never work again.
Dave
'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)