A press release from Sasktel caught my eye last week: “SaskTel and South Saskatchewan Ready partner to bring infiNET service to four communities in Southern Saskatchewan”.
I receive a lot of similar press releases, but this one stood out because of the funding mechanism. “Through the Community Participation Program, communities provide a portion of the funds required to cover the capital costs to bring SaskTel services to their residents.”
This wasn’t a federal or provincially funded broadband program. A collection of communities got together and approached Sasktel, to provide the portion of the funds required to cover the capital shortfall for the business case to upgrade the facilities serving their residents.
There are other community models that I have seen, but in many cases, the coalition acts more as a lobbying agency, trying to accelerate broadband funding allocations from more senior levels of government. In the worst cases, the agency inserts another layer of bureaucracy into the process.
I must admit that sometimes, when I read statements like “To remain competitive and grow, businesses need high-speed connectivity,” I wonder why the government is funding the broadband expansion, and not the businesses that will be benefiting from that investment. I suppose that businesses can be even more competitive if they can get someone else to cover their costs.
In no way am I diminishing the need for federal and provincial government funding programs for rural broadband. I have been critical of some of the overlap, and there is an opacity associated with the criteria for how priorities are set for project selection, some of which can appear to be political opportunism.
As such, I liked seeing the novel approach of South Saskatchewan Ready, with communities taking economic development matters into their own hands, secured by a capable communications service provider as partner.
I’ll be writing about some other community-based activities later this week.