Asks for Review & Vary
GATINEAU – A large consortium of Ontario communities and other groups, together known as SouthWestern Integrated Fibre Technology Inc. (SWIFT) has filed an application with the CRTC in the hopes the Regulator will reconsider how it qualifies rural regions to receive millions of dollars in funding to deliver broadband to its residents.
In an application filed Wednesday with the Commission, SWIFT’s leadership believes the Commission’s recently outlined $750 million rural broadband fund, with its decision to rely “exclusively on error prone indicators of maximum theoretical link speeds captured in the ISED’s hexagonal mapping approach and exclude underserved areas in “partially served” hexagons,” is wrong.
The new fund’s plan is to identify regions across the country – using Innovation, Science and Economic Development’s maps (in which all regions are divided up into hexagons which show the types of connectivity available in each) – which are unserved or underserved by broadband providers and provide funds needed to build out high speed internet infrastructure.
However, the Commission plans to consider a hexagon with even one customer receiving good broadband service as a region which market forces are present enough so that the broadband funding is not required there. SWIFT notes in its application that these government ministry hexagons are often just plain wrong.
“For more than a decade, rural communities and research on rural connectivity have been well aware of inaccuracies in the assessment of ‘served/underserved/unserved’ using the hexagon method favoured by ISED and previous funding programs,” reads the application. “Many individuals that live and work in rural and remote communities, lower levels of government, and parties representing rural regions from across Canada have provided clear and incontrovertible evidence demonstrating serious inaccuracies in ISED’s hexagonal approach to mapping broadband availability,” and the “Commission’s justifications for dismissing this body of knowledge, evidence, and failure to learn from mistakes of the past are insufficient, factually tenuous, and contrary to basic principles of evidence-based decision making.”
As well, notes SWIFT, it has overlaid the ISED maps over its own detailed data of where service lies and estimates “indicate that around 230,000 premises (residents and businesses) in Southwestern Ontario currently lack access to service offers with advertised speeds that meet the Commission’s 50/10 Mbps aspirational targets. Out of this, we estimate around 100,000 premises are located in ‘partially served’ hexagons the Commission’s approach will exclude from being eligible to apply,” reads its submission.
“The decision to exclude partially served hexagons (where at least one user can theoretically access 50/10 Mbps speeds per CRTC 2018-377 specifications) will disqualify areas containing a substantial proportion of underserved premises without access to services with 50/10 Mbps headline speeds from benefiting from the Commission’s Broadband Fund.”
Extrapolating nationally, that means two to three million Canadians in rural communities will remain without broadband access, or at least whose service providers can not apply for part of the $750 million fund, says the SWIFT application.
So, it has asked for the CRTC to:
- Redefine service area boundaries as the edge of exclusion zones, and then define everywhere else lacking access to services that meet the Commission’s “basic service” thresholds as eligible to apply.
- Allow underserved communities to provide other evidence such as standardized Internet measurements to demonstrate their needs and therefore eligibility to apply.
- Vacate/delete the new principle that in partially served hexagons market forces are “likely” to improve connectivity.
- Specify that underserved areas in partially served hexagons located in the vicinity of fully underserved hexagons (10, 20, 30 km?) will be eligible to apply as part of larger projects that cover multiple hexagons along with their neighbouring communities.
The SWIFT consortium is an initiative of the Western Ontario Warden’s Caucus and includes the likes of the City of Windsor, the Region of Niagara, the Region of Waterloo, Georgian College, Grey-Bruce Health Services, many other municipalities, municipal services, local health and education organizations, as well as a number of First Nation communities.
