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

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.

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.

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