SUCCESSIVE FEDERAL GOVERNMENTS have for years thrown money at the northern broadband problem with varying degrees of success.
Programs such as BRAND (Broadband, Rural and Northern Development), Connecting Canadians and now Connect to Innovate are the three most recent ones, backed by hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars. For the most part though, these national initiatives have been more broadly-based, focusing on both the transport and local access problems and many have argued this approach has missed addressing the most pressing problem.
That problem is a lack of transport and backbone network redundancy, a critical infrastructure need which the federal government’s Connect to Innovate program aims to address.
To date, there is one fibre strand linking some of the North to the southern high speed Internet infrastructure. So when this link goes down, the North is frozen out (pardon the pun) of everyday activities such as banking, online government services, looking for jobs and even simply making phone calls from the North to friends, family and business associates in the southern part of the country.
“There's only one fiber link in the entire territory of Yukon and it's gone dark before,” said Cameron Zubko, president of northern wireless competitor Ice Wireless in an interview this year with Cartt.ca in Whitehorse. “It's been cut and every bank machine has stopped working Every bank machine. Airlines stop flying. Everything. The entire economy drags to a halt with no connectivity.” Plus, Ice customer calls (and all others, too) to the south fail as they, too require fibre to be delivered.
This major challenge for broadband in the North is supposed to be addressed by the Connect to Innovate program. It’s big focus is on funding more transport and more backbone infrastructure so the North has additional high capacity links to the Internet backbone.
“The funding for Connect to Innovate is directed to new backbone infrastructure in rural and remote communities across Canada. Building this infrastructure is the modern equivalent of building roads or railway spurs into rural and remote areas, connecting them to the global economy. This backbone infrastructure is often fibre optic-based, but can be comprised of a range of technologies including microwave and satellite service,” states the Connect to Innovate website.
Another key tenet of the program recognizes the challenges associated with building backbone infrastructure in remote areas – it’s simply to expensive for competitors to build their own transport links to the North without assistance. This is why the government has stipulated that “all projects funded under the program must be open to third parties for dedicated capacity purchases on a wholesale or retail basis.”
Despite the goal of adding more backbone infrastructure in the North and allowing competitors to access those networks, some question whether the program will actually get the job done, particularly as it relates to the open access requirement.
Competitors Cartt.ca spoke to acknowledged that ensuring new government funded backbone infrastructure has an open access provision is a good thing but they wonder though whether this will actually happen at rates that are affordable to them.
“We reached out about two years ago asking ISED (Innovation, Science and Economic Development) to clarify what open access is,” said Samer Bishay, president and CEO at Iristel (Iristel is the parent company of Ice Wireless). “Their response was have you had any issues where you did not get open access? And I was like ‘of course we did’ If there is no way to force them to give us satellite backhaul at cost plus or disclose what their cost is then there’s your issue right there.”
“Even though we spent millions building infrastructure, putting broadband in 33 communities, we’re in two today, Yellowknife and Fort Providence." – Jeff Phillipp, SSi Micro
Jeff Philipp, president and CEO at SSi Micro Ltd., has some experience dealing with third party network access, too. The company has been fighting for seven years to get access to Northwestel’s fibre transport in the Northwest Territories (NWT) to no avail, he says.
Northwestel has been in the CRTC’s cross hairs on wholesale access for about a year now. In August, the commission rejected a review and vary application from the company asking the CRTC to take another look at a 
previous decision that rejected its wholesale network costing methodology. (More HERE.)
Phillip contends that because of its protracted regulatory fight, SSi can only service a fraction of what it would like in NWT because it can’t get access to the Northwestel fibre in the region. “Even though we spent millions building infrastructure, putting broadband in 33 communities, we’re in two today, Yellowknife and Fort Providence. The rest are all gone because we still don’t have wholesale competitive access to fibre,” Philipp told Cartt.ca in an interview in September. SSi was previously using satellite to provide broadband to all 33 communities, but when fibre became available it wanted wholesale access to the Northwestel fibre – but couldn't get it.
Adds Ice Wireless’ Zubko (pictured in the Ice store in downtown Whitehorse): “If there's another company that is operating the transport, especially if that company has been the recipient of public funds, that company needs to be very tightly managed by the federal government so that they don't overcharge for the transport that all Canadians paid for,” he explained.
For Bishay and Philipp, the North won’t see big improvements to Internet services until there is truer competition in the region.
“You’ll never be able to reach that level of service for Northerners to be on par with urban (areas) without competition,” said Bishay. “Even though it might be painful and it might not make sense where you’re sharing that one line, but you have to share that one line to start that snowball effect in order for nature to take over and then let it be survival of the fittest.”
Click here for part I of our feature and here for part II. Watch for parts IV and V next week.
