Designed by committee

i-Waterfront was featured in a story in yesterday’s National Post. The article was about plans to award a fibre-optic contract in the Toronto Waterfront project.

The theme of the story is that the deal offers an insight into how the agency spends our tax dollars. It starts out by examining the legal gymnastics to launder the influence of the New York-based hedge fund that controls Connex See Service, the proposed provider of fibre optic service to “i-Waterfront.” The company is a successor to Cygnal Technologies.

The project is running well behind schedule. Two years ago, the Globe and Mail ran a story that quoted Waterfront Toronto’s executive director of Intelligent Communities saying:

Incumbent companies say, ‘What’s the problem? We have broadband and it’s improving all the time.’ The analogy I use is broadband is like a paved street. Incumbent companies are saying they’re going to have paved roads but only have them one lane wide. If they’re only one lane wide, there’s not much point, is there?

Sounds good if you say it fast, but it doesn’t really reflect the way networks are being built.

For example, most multiple dwelling units – apartment buildings – are already getting fibre to the building. In fact, most new buildings are getting fibre from multiple suppliers, cable and telcos. In Atlantic Canada, Bell Aliant, in a competitive marketplace, will continue its FTTH expansion with 140,000 homes to be passed by year-end.

Instead, Waterfront Toronto, a government agency, envisions establishing a monopoly provider of fibre. This may provide the ego-boosting benefit of saying that the project isn’t dependent on the incumbents, but it ignores more than a hundred years of communications history that taught us that the only entity that delivers worse service than a regulated monopoly is a government-owned monopoly. Waterfront Toronto is jointly owned by all three levels of government and will have an unregulated monopoly service; can it get any better?

Most RFPs have clauses that ask for assurances that the bidder is financially sound. The company that appears to be selected by Waterfront Toronto somehow escaped such scrutiny. Perhaps the failure of Cygnal Technologies might have been a clue that the business model itself might be flawed.

Many RFPs aren’t really looking for proposals; they already specify a solution and are just looking for a quote that matches. By specifying the solution, did the RFP limit the degrees of freedom of potential bidders to provide creative solutions?

Does anyone really believe that there is a shortage of advanced telecommunications solutions in the core of Toronto? The competitive commercial and consumer marketplace is delivering advanced solutions today.

Looking at the condition of our sewers, roads and other government infrastructure. Cutting the ribbon creates a great photo op, but maintenance is notoriously underfunded. I call it a “just-too-late” approach. Not sure I would want that from the people providing my advanced communications services.