Publicly Funded Broadband and 802.11

bflame writes: "The Canadian province of Alberta is building the infrastructure to provide highspeed internet service to 422 cities. The government of Alberta along with Cisco Networks, Microsoft and Axia will be installing highspeed fiber optic lines to link 422 cities. The contracts also required competition among ISPs to insure lower internet costs. Cisco provides a nice write up in IQ magazine. Globe Technologies is reporting that work has started on the Alberta Supernet. The government of Alberta has an article about the supernet along with this article." We've mentioned Alberta earlier - nice to see they're moving ahead with the project. And an anonymous reader sent in a link about the city of Tallahasee rolling out a public WLAN.

Comments

Canada, the broadband friendly nation

[brinkster]

In the west there's Shaw Cable with speeds around 4000/350 or Telus DSL at 1500/256. In the east there's Bell Sympatico 1000/128, Rogers Cable 2000/128 and Videotron 3000/128. Plus there's also the various resellers that are basically rebranded from the bigger companies. The above all cost about $40-$50 CAN. Some companies are also introducing a "lite" product which offers 128/128 speeds for $25 CAN a month which is great for people that have little use for the internet but hate keeping the phone line busy. Even if you can't get DSL or Cable there is a satellite service which will allow you to download at better speeds than dialup.
This will bring more jobs and more broadband, hopefully the other provinces will follow.

Repeater Stations

[silentbozo]

Now, who wants to volunteer to put up repeater stations so people outside of Alberta can leech off of the public infrastructure? :)

Re:That is one seriously smart move

[tonywong]

If you thought you liked it because of these articles...you should see the prices we pay. You should pack your bags and come on over.

There are two major providers of broadband here in Edmonton (one of two major cities in Alberta). Cable modem (www.shaw.ca) is $40 per month, and DSL is $50 per month (www.telusplanet.com).
What's so special about that? If you factor in the prices I mentioned are in Canadian dollars (about 63 cents US), you'll realize that Albertans pay just a little more than dial-up users in the US.

Even better is that my provider (Shaw) doesn't care how many machines I've got hooked up to my cable modem. I've got 10 different machines here without needing NAT or DHCP servers of my own.

This is a Good Thing

[cperciva]

From a public policy perspective, I don't understand why there aren't more governments doing this. It is generally accepted that governments should provide and maintain a highway system; how is internet connectivity any different?

There are many things which governments get involved with (eg health care) which I think they should stay out of as much as possible; but when it comes to natural monopolies I certainly see that they have a role to play.

Re:This is a Good Thing

[cperciva]

I fail to see how broadband internet access can be called a natural monopoly

The cost of connecting 422 small towns is vastly smaller than 422 times the cost of hooking up one small town.

Ashland, Oregon municipal fiber network

[Voline]

Ashland, Oregon already has a publicly owned fiber-optic network through out the town.

http://www.ashlandfiber.net/

This is serving as the basis for a community wireless network. Businesses and individuals will hook 802.11b nodes up to their connections to the public broadband network and open it up to guest access by anyone within range. The goal it to get enough people involved to cover the whole town with WiFi.

http://www.ashlandunwired.com/

Good to see!

[ZigMonty]

It's good to see someone showing some foresight. You can't expect immature technologies to be viable to private companies, hence @Home's problems. Until increasingly important services like broadband can be delivered profitably and cheaply to the population, it's the role of the government to provide them (for a fee of course, but a low one). Insert economies of scale arguments, etc.

That's not to say that *every* unprofitable service should be provided but the internet is becoming increasingly important to modern society. The first communities to get these ubiquitous connections will start to be seen as high-tech communities. The rest will fall behind. They'll get it eventually, but by then it won't be any more special than the telephone. It'll snowball. As more tech-savvy (and high income) people move into the area, they'll increase demand for more tech-services.

Well, that's what I think anyway. OK, I'm dreaming. This is making Australia (where I am) look even more backwards. This will be really interesting to follow.

Technology Rolling Along?

[rand.srand()]

Not to spoil the party of those people looking for free broadband... but this strikes me as very silly for two reasons:

1) There are only 3 non-overlapping channels in 802.11b. Are all of the transmitter sites going to occupy just one of those, or will they use all of them to overlap and maximize coverage? How will this interact with private WLANs?

2) 802.11b is a stepping stone to future wireless LAN/WAN/etc technologies and a primitive one at that. Building a whole infrastructure around it is crazy. (see also: the reason North America is still on CDMA/TDMA)

I've seen a large number of projects crop up locally trying to connect all kinds of things with 802.11b... government facilities, hospitals, etc. Even my company is using it now to link our buildings. It's going to be very crowded with only 3 channels and no one to coordinate the whole mess.

The real shocker here...

[Geek In Training]

The real shocker in this article is not that the Canadian government is doing something so tech-savvy in provisding ISP services...

... but that the province of Alberta actually has 422 cities!

(In fact, according to this google cached page, there are only 9 cities over 25,000 population!)

Color me amazed!
-RT

That's nice...

[Linegod]

We call it CommunityNet here in Saskatchewan, and the project is over a year old. It's mandated by the Federal Government, Supernet just happens to be the name for the 'Alberta' part of the project. The mention of Microsoft or any other software provider is meaningless. Each hospital, school, government site runs whatever software they want, and here, serveral of them are running Linux, Mac or Solaris. Some of the schools also have the Sun One? connected to the network.

It's a nice project, and a huge cash cow for the big ISPs and hardware providers, but there is still room for the little guy to get a peice of the action

.

State of world broadband; Canada could leapfrog us

[wackybrit]

Canada is really good at showing up countries much higher up the GNP chain. Take a look at the G7.

First off we have the USA and Japan, broadband coverage isn't too bad in these countries, although rural coverage is somewhat patchy. Canada is one-uping both of these countries.

Germany is third. As of the start of 2002, Germany had 1.8 million DSL subscribers. For a country with a net population of something around 10 million, this is pretty good.

Next is the United Kingdom, my home country, which puts up the most pitiful broadband attempt of any of the top 20 countries by GNP. There are places 15 miles from LONDON that can't even get DSL yet. British Telecom has pretty much said that any telco exchanges not being converted to provide DSL by 2005 probably won't be done forever.. the demand is too low.

Unlike the Canadian government, the British government is keen for everyone to have broadband, but doesn't actually want to help. They believe that private enterprise will get there, and don't want to risk getting their hands dirty (a la Millennium Dome)

So, well done Canada. I think Canada will leapfrog us all, and with e-government and a 90%> wireup rate throughout the country, it could actually jump up the GNP tables and become a serious industrial contender this century. Heck, the tiny Netherlands did it in the 1700s.

A smart move

[InterruptDescriptorT]

It's been said in earlier post that this is a good move. I agree wholeheartedly... this has so many more benefits than just 'getting everyone online'.

What many people fail to see is that by doing this, you'll draw young people into the world of computer science and other badly-needed fields, like engineering, physics and chemistry. Giving young kids the access to the vast resources that the Internet has to offer is going to encourage them to use the technology and become skilled with it, and that's the first step to a 21st-century workforce. Schools are laden with psyc, business and communications majors, none of whom are helping the estimated half-million job vacancies in high-tech job positions in the US alone. But get kids motivated and interested in technology, and even if a small percentage of them becomes so enamoured of it that they choose it as a career, Alberta is developing a very, very educated and desired workforce. This brings jobs and investment to the province.

I honestly cannot see why the US doesn't do this more. Kids' education here, let's face it, is suspect, and those that do graduate won't touch engineering and science (hence the glut of comms and psyc majors searching low-paying jobs in the market right now). But light the spark of interest in technology by granting them access to these resources, and reap the rewards many hundred fold in the future.

Smart way to take control

[bill_mcgonigle]

Interesting government tactic. Find a service out of your control that people like, then agree to provide the service to the taxpayers for 'free'. Everybody knows who's paying for the service, yet the government will still claim it's free, and thereby extend their influence and power.

What's particularly interesting is that governments typically have not taken control of means of communications where private industry has been successful. Sure, there's the Postal service, but AFAIK, that wasn't a government take over, it was a government-inspired service (at least the Pony Express part). Somebody correct me if I'm wrong here.

Governments could have provided free newspaper, telegraph, radio, telephone, and television services, but they typically haven't done this to the exclusion of private enterprise. They tend to stick to things like sewers, water, roads - things that can really only be accomplished by local governments.

This is not a good thing

[scoove]

The US had a monopoly Internet for a few years - NSFNET - which wasn't widely used by many other than academic and research folks, and really had done very poorly extending beyond subsidized locations. Yes, many of us /.ers cut our teeth there and have wonderful memories of the fun we had (at significant taxpayer expense), but we can't forget that while NSFNET advanced the protocols and connected the schools, the real revolution came when real, normal people got connected (I know, this is soooo anti-elitist!)

In 1992, I worked with a rural community of about 8,000 that wanted to launch a freenet. The local NSF regional gave us a quote of $65,000 up front plus $2,500 a month for Internet service - using a 56 Kbps leased line! (They had 35 PhDs on staff and naturally had high costs - that was their justification).

Thanks to the pioneering efforts of UUNET, CERFNET, PSI (now defunct, alas), Sprint, NEARNET/SURANET, and the folks at the Commercial Internet Exchange, the NSF monopoly (which was planned to go into a Bell-like regional with ANS and the RBOCs running the show) was broken apart. Multilateral and later, bilateral peering, became the norm. Exchange points grew (like MAE-E, MAE-W) and the commercial market blew open.

This commercialization is what also brought hundreds of millions of regular people (read "not employed by the government") onto the Internet. Not 23 years of NSFNET, but 3 years of commercial Internet.

While you'd think folks would have discovered the government model doesn't work, we still have numerous states, municipalities and even national governments trying the old way. Iowa, for instance, built a boondoggle fiber network that costs $75,000 to get a connection. Sure, you get fiber, but the Internet connectivity squeezes down to a connection no faster than an ISDN pipe at the egress to the Internet. Although the taxpayers paid for it, many of the fiber customers are leaving for - you guessed - competitive commercial service. We've got the same issues with municipalities providing broadband and having to raise electric, sewer and gas rates to cover their inefficiencies.

I really hate beating a very dead horse, but for some reason some folks like the previous poster continue to believe misnomers. The Internet isn't like a highway system and it doesn't benefit from government administration.

What it does benefit from is being offered and operated by people that focus on this and only this expertise - not people that also issue your license plates, run the welfare agencies, operate electric power, clean your sewer, etc. Being a competent ISP is not a part-time operation.

It also benefits from competition, since this is usually about the only motivator for most folks.

*scoove*

Re:Socialists. No way, eh?

[Soko]

/me feeds the troll:

Whoa there, Mr. Rebublican. Two hops short of Cuba? Don't think so. We are as democratic as they come (well, almost).

This is a Canadian thing, you see. Our country is so big with so little population thay we are forced to be communictaions intensive. Yup, lots of our infrestructure is government mandated, but it needs to be - otherwise, it just wouldn't get done. Private Industry wouldn't do it, and well they shouldn't, since there's not much profit to be made. However, we as a country essentially need top shelf communications like this in order to remain a country, since we wouldn't speak to each other much otherwise. It may sound weird to USAians, but it's good for us - like universal public health care. I for one look forward to conversing with my Albertan comapatriots over High Speed bit-pipes - it brings us closer.

So, at the risk of being a jingoist,

Take off, eh?

Soko

PS - Maybe you're just miffed at the Hockey Gold we won. :^D

Re:Getting priorities straight

[Kwil]

For two months before the strike, all we heard about was "salaries, salaries, salaries! We want more money!".. so the government offered enough money to make them the highest paid teachers in the country, which the teachers REJECTED.

And if you dig even deeper, you find out that the reason that offer was rejected was that the money the government offered was to be pulled from funding previously earmarked for the classrooms.

Do they want more money? Damn straight. After all, the nurses got a 20-25% pay raise - conveniently just before election time, doctors got a 20-25% pay raise - conveniently just before election time, and the government even gave themselves a nice 15%-20% pay raise - conveniently just after election time. (They claim 10% but remember that MLA pay isn't taxable). The teachers see that and want some of that action. Who can really blame them? Personally, I don't think they're worth that much more either, but I can see their point.

But they don't want it at the expense of the classroom - unlike King Klein.