TORONTO – In its effort to set universal broadband Internet speeds for all of Canada, the CRTC set far too low a target when it announced in early May in its "obligation to serve" proceeding decision it expects all Canadians to have access to 5 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload speeds by 2015. That was the view expressed by at least two panel speakers at the Canadian Telecom Summit on Tuesday during the “Connecting Canadians” session.
“This is just my opinion, but I do think (the CRTC’s Internet speed target) is too low,” said Daniel O’Connell, president of the U.S.-based non-profit Fiber to the Home Council. “I think it is a very fundamental, worst-case minimum standard that we could roll out.”
Ron Styles, president and CEO of SaskTel, said broadband is not a static concept and a decade-old target equivalent to 1.5Mbps dial-up Internet speeds has little meaning today. “Targets must be rolling and they must be dynamic,” he said. “I doubt there is anybody in the room who could live with 1.5 Mbps. So why do we expect somebody living in rural and remote areas to live with that?”
“In Saskatchewan, the increase on our wireless network in terms of data right now is 5% per week, and the same numbers are occurring right across Canada,” Styles said. “That growth must translate into new (broadband) targets.”
While broadband connection speeds are important, throughput capacity is also key to broadband’s value proposition, said John Maduri, CEO of rural Internet provider Xplornet Communications. Maduri said he wanted to dispel the myth out there that rural Canadians don’t use broadband in the same way as urban Canadians do.
“Our average usage on our wireless networks is 18 GB per month, which is essentially the same number as the national average for all technologies, whether it’s terrestrial or wireless,” Maduri said. “Rural Canadians do not use broadband differently.”
Eventually the panel discussion turned to the issue of licensing more wireless spectrum, with 700MHz and 2.5GHz spectrum auctions anticipated in 2012.
Maduri said Xplornet will ask Industry Canada to separate rural spectrum licences from urban licences as part of the upcoming spectrum auctions. “The way that licences are determined or structured currently, there are 47 Tier 4 licences for urban and rural populations combined,” Maduri said. “Our ask of Industry Canada is on those 47 licences – that’s 27% of the 172 Tier 4 licences – that they unbundle urban and rural.”
This would enable service providers such as Xplornet to “get in the game on these critical elements of spectrum,” Maduri said, explaining that otherwise Xplornet will be forced to compete with large incumbents, such as Bell, Telus, Shaw and Rogers, for spectrum markets where rural households may make up only four per cent of dwellings in the area covered.
Not surprisingly, Bell Canada’s vice-president of regulatory law, Jonathan Daniels, took a diametrically opposed position that there should not be any restrictions in the upcoming spectrum auctions. “You can’t start making different auction rules between the different players, because it is the largest players who are most likely to roll out broadband to rural areas as a result of the spectrum auction,” Daniels said.
He went on to argue that a closed spectrum auction would limit the ability of incumbent wireless providers to compete for some spectrum blocks, which in turn would result in less wireless rollouts in rural areas, a theme all the large players are repeating of late.
