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Canada Has 'No Plan' To Bring Broadband To Rural and Remote Communities, Watchdog Says (vice.com)
Canada has "no plan" to wire up remote communities that lack high-speed broadband connections, Canada's auditor general said in a scathing report tabled in Parliament on Tuesday. From a report: The report comes just two years after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau visited Shoal Lake 40 First Nation, an Indigenous community at the border of Manitoba and Ontario, and vowed that his government would work to end the digital divide that leaves rural and remote communities without high-speed internet.
"This report says what we already knew, which is that there is no strategy to bring the rest of Canada online," Laura Tribe, executive director of advocacy group Openmedia, said in a phone call. "What we keep hearing from the government is increasing numbers -- 80 percent, 90 percent -- but until we're at 100 percent, the problem isn't solved."
"This report says what we already knew, which is that there is no strategy to bring the rest of Canada online," Laura Tribe, executive director of advocacy group Openmedia, said in a phone call. "What we keep hearing from the government is increasing numbers -- 80 percent, 90 percent -- but until we're at 100 percent, the problem isn't solved."
A lot of our problems arise from the fact that we are a country with 4 people per KM^2.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
The Canadian government will probably spare no expense in making copious supplies of marijuana available, even if you live 500 miles from the next human being.
Well, the reason rural locations have access to electricity and phone lines is due to the government having a role in getting those lines deployed in the past.
Canada's rural area is actually rural. Try bring broadband 100 miles to serve 2 people?
In the USA though, very little of of the USA is that remote unless you are talking about Alaska. The vast majority of "rural" America is almost always less than 30 minutes to a "major" city of at least a 1000 people.
The vast majority of rural Canada or Alaska it might be hours before you see another living sole, let alone even before you hit a 1 horse town with 20-50 people.
Look, right now polar bears are eating people in the North.
No, I'm not kidding. They can't hunt on the ice, due to climate change, so they're eating people.
You want high-speed internet? It has to be provided by satellite. Can't run a cable 2000 km for one family.
It's part of why Yellowknife literally is running out of food. As we speak.
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No, a lot of phone lines are from renewable energy and diesel generators allowing satellite phone uplinks. Canada is big.
No, bigger.
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Some of these communities are so rural their phone service is barely functional.
Years ago I had the misfortune of working on some stuff related to Canada Post. They have a computer system in which the local retailers dial in, upload their transactions, and then disconnect.
The problem is in some places the phone line was so crappy even over a low speed dialup line, it couldn't be made to work.
We'd call them up, ask if we can dial into their machine, and then waste an hour or so trying to make a telephone line about as sophisticated as two cans on a string connect while listening to a modem trying to negotiate ever lower speeds until it gave up. I had one guy in a rural community in Newfoundland laugh at me and basically say "Buddy, if you can make it work, go right ahead, but you're far from the first person to try it, our phone system around here sucks".
How you get broadband to a place that barely has working telephones, I have no idea.
Hell, my Aunt and Uncle still have a party line, and they're not that rural. The problem is the telephone lines and cable end about 2km down the road, and unless they pay the company to string the last distance (thousands of dollars), they're stuck with telephone technology from the 60's.
Now imagine a community which is essentially fly-in only because there are no real roads and you're so far in the middle of nowhere you might as well be on another planet.
Canada has more arse-end-of-nowhere than most people can possibly fathom.
Have no fear! Capitalism solves all needs of the consumer!
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
How is it the role of government to ensure high broadband internet?
The Great and the Good use to understand there was great value in the universality of such systems. Electrification and phone service were both driven by government policies that facilitated and subsidized extension of these networks to rural areas, including those areas that were inherently unprofitable. The utilities tasked to make this so understood they were to shift the costs as required, and this reality was built into the rate structure.
That take on the world has been lost on all sides. The establishment right does what Comcast says, and Comcast et al. just want to milk high margin customers. The establishment left has only contempt for anyone not living in diverse urban areas; the rural white trailer trash need to change their ways and get an efficiency apartment in town or just shut up; subsidizing their needs is just more white privilege and systemic racism.
If "indigenous" Canadians natives can make this a racial justice issue they may be able to pry service out of the system. Rural US is just fucked; no one wants them and they can just go die quietly. Some of them are building municipal/township systems. That's about the only feasible solution in the US unless Musk+Starlink pan out in a big way.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Delivery of Public Services over the internet would be hard to sell if not everyone has the possibility of internet access. Whether the cost cut of being able to do away with certain 'analogue' services in favor of going wholly electronic is of course entirely debatable and YMMV. In the US the profit motive is first and foremost, but Canadas' more socialistic approach to certain things might override the cost vs. profit argument. The US forces the telco to extend phone line or cell towers into some very rural areas, and charges everyone else for that service.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
A capitalistic system of telcos is going to focus their infrastructure building where they can make the most return on investment. In other words areas with the highest population density. They'll also happily employ any technology they can (ie ADSL, etc) to enable broadband over existing copper infrastructure since it's relatively low cost for them and gives them near monopolistic access to a customer base in many areas. Running actual fiber lines costing thousands of dollars to the middle of nowhere so they can pick up five more broadband customers is not going to be very high on their priority list though.
One hope for rural broadband might come in the form of some kind of low orbit satellite endeavour, like SpaceX's Starlink service - if it ever gets off the ground and they can get the costs under control enough in order to get a return on the investment.
The better possibility would probably be for local municipalities to decide to use their own tax dollars to build their own fiber infrastructure if broadband in their area is a priority. Wire the town with fiber, and connect into the nearest backbone using whatever method is available. Anyone with a farm house in the middle of some gigantic acreage however is still probably going to have to deal with ADSL over copper, unless they want to lay the fiber themselves.
This project seems to make more sense for Canadians & rural America :
Elon Musk StarLink
Wouldn't it be more cost-effective to install a few towers vs. running wire/fiber into remote areas?
This seems like a problem that SpaceX is going to solve for them.
The Canadian government will follow this up with funding for First Nations to get on board and then claim victory.
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
Canada's gov't is right to stay out of this. Why? Because it's expensive and unnecessary.
Elon Musk is going to "wire" the world with over 10,000 low earth orbiting satellites:
https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/s...
Low earth orbiting means the latency problem won't be a problem, and you can use 'em to do your First Person Shooter games with low ping times. Will require some waiting, but you can't wire up Canada before Elon Musk / Toney Stark / Iron Man launches his 10,000+ satellites. Hey, when you've got rockets that work and are much cheaper than anyone else's, you can do s*** like that...
Only works if you're in a big town.
A lot of people aren't.
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(I'm Canadian, in a megalopolis suburb.)
First off, in Canada, the vast vast vast majority of the population is fully high-speed, fully cellular phone, fully wired, fully connected in every way.
Second, the vast majority of rural communities are just as well connected.
Third, our idea of "high speed" is, well to be polite, leaps and bounds above what the USA thinks is "high speed". Simply put, our low-end is above the USA average.
Fourth, and this is no joke, the reason that all of your cellular providers advertise "the best network" is because all of the USA networks are just plain horrible. I've never traveled to the USA, for a day or for a week, roaming or on a local sim, without poor reception and dropped calls. When cellular providers advertise in Canada, it's just funny because all of the big carriers are exactly the same -- superb. Years between dropped calls; seriously.
The "rural" neighbourhoods being discussed here are a collection of places that meet the following descriptions:
- fewer than ten humans for hundreds of miles, or were during the last construction phase
- refused construction of any infrastructure before, and are now changing their minds
- have chosen to live so far from others that they don't ever have paved roads
What you may not realize is that these "rural" communities want billion dollar infrastructure for a million dollar market. It would be cheaper for my tax dollars to buy them a house in the city. -- think of the expense of physically wiring them without roads for the equipment transport
Some communities are only accessible by road over ice in the winter.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
The operant term is 'no plan' -- think they are hoping that private enterprises will implement it and if it suits them, nationalize it later after working out the risks. Meanwhile, more government services are being moved to the Internet so if you do not live in an area with some sort of service you are SOL. Move to a city... current crop of politicians would be delighted to clear the rural areas (sound familiar?) so services are being selectively rolled back.
Where we live, for a long time the only reliable service available was broadband satellite service through Xplornet. It was decent -- just bothered by weather at your end AND the satellite base station. Latency was up there but it was adequate to do day trading. Skype and any VOIP services was a different matter -- out of sequence packet arrival is not funny in a serious conversation. Then a WiMAX tower got built on the mainland and we could move to that. But satellite is a real solution.
Suspect part of the problem is the dearth of transportation in the north. There are hardly any way to get north besides fly and that runs up the cost pretty fast. The politicians like to fancy Canada as a northern nation but their actions say something very different -- more than 100 miles north of the US border is another country and they really don't want to go there.
Pretty sure places without cop shops tend not to have it. Not everyone is big city like you are. Some of my classmates died in a massive mudslide a few years back, the nearest town in BC was 20 km away. They used satellite. For everything.
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I think I understand where you're going with this, but I'm afraid your ignorance is showing. It would probably help if you cut down on the racism and bogotry.
HIH!
What is the best way to get broadband coverage for people living in extremely sparsely populated ultra-rural areas?
1) Spend enormous amounts of money building fiber to remote communities and households
2) Spend a smaller but still large amount of money investing in SpaceX's Starlink constellation, which can potentially benefit all Canadians, not just ultra-rural ones
So like how Americans don't speak English and can't spell.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism