GATINEAU – Including broadband in a redefined basic service objective (BSO) is an absolute requirement, the Nunavut Broadband Development Corp. (NBDC) and SSi Group of Companies told the CRTC on the second day of its basic service obligation hearing. The problem in getting good broadband in the Far North, they say, is the lack of adequate backbone infrastructure.
“The bottleneck for Nunavut is backbone and that cannot be solved with a fragmented approach where services for consumers are supported separately from services for business or government. All Nunavut users rely on the same upstream services delivered over the same inadequate infrastructure – legacy satellite,” said Oana Spino, executive director at NBDC.
For northern Internet users, speed is less of an issue, it’s more about data caps and backbone bottlenecks. This is a combination of how the satellite backbone is provisioned and the fact that there are many more users in a household in the North (it can sometimes hit double digits) than there are in the average Canadian home.
That’s why, explained SSi Micro Ltd. founder and chief executive Jeff Philipp (pictured), speed is a “red herring” and the problem revolves around over-subscription (the number of users per household) and data caps, which are governed by backbone capacity. He suggested that a 3 Mbps download and 0.5 Mbps upload service would be enough for northern users.
“When somebody has to worry about whether or not they should watch this Netflix episode tonight or download that movie tomorrow because they may not be able to finish their homework, that’s not a basic service, that’s not a viable service long term,” he said.
Philipp added that fixing the problem centers around looking at it differently. “We need to quit thinking in terms of 25 Mbps or 10 Mbps because those calculations end up leading statisticians and finance people to very, very large numbers for how much the backbone would cost,” he said.
Both SSi and NBDC suggest combining the needs of government, residential users, education and industry into one pipe is a solution. A shared network would work more efficiently while at the same providing enough capacity for all users. For example, the government network goes largely unused in the evening and night time when there is a spike in residential use.
“We have a constrained resource and if we were to use it better, we could get a lot more from it.” Jeff Philipp, SSi Group
“We have a constrained resource and if we were to use it better, we could get a lot more from it and it wouldn’t cost the consumer any more, it wouldn’t cost the government anymore. It’s simply allowing the sharing of capacity,” explained Philipp.
SSi is calling for the creation of a backbone assistance program (BAP), an initiative that resembles in some ways the Alberta SuperNet. The program would identify the communities in need and then allocate money under a competitive process to service providers. The amount of money available under this type of program would be established by service obligations.
A key part of this program is that the backbone would have to be open to all competitors wishing to connect to it. But a key difference with the SuperNet initiative is that local access infrastructure would be built at the nodes. This type of approach would go a long way to solving the backbone problem, while also allowing potential new ISPs to startup.
Other rural parts of Canada are also facing broadband challenges. For example, the Eastern Ontario Wardens’ Caucus (EOWC) and its Eastern Ontario Regional Network (EORN) say there has been an under-investment from the private sector in critical broadband infrastructure in its area. But they added their experience with the provincial and federal governments show that collaboration can lead to private sector investment.
The organization secured public dollars to expand broadband infrastructure and without that funding, it said, private sector companies would have remained on the sidelines. The investment in transport networks are critical for rural communities, the group added.
“The rural experience clearly documents that transport facilities are not duplicable outside of Canada’s urban centres. In fact, in Eastern Ontario, even the incumbent was not willing to extend or upgrade its regional transport network or provide service providers access to available capacity before EOWC/EORN stepped in with inducements in the form of public subsidies,” said Dave Burton, chair of EORN.
EOWC/EORN believe that fixed and mobile broadband should be part of a redefined BSO.
Telesat and Xplornet Communications are two of the bigger witnesses on Wednesday.
