I want to return to the letter to the editor by the Michael Ignatieff. Yesterday, I said in passing that there were a number of issues arising from the Opposition Leader’s approach.
Here is the full text of the letter:
This summer, while I crisscrossed the country on the Liberal Express, rural Canadians told me the struggles they face without access to high-speed Internet (Disconnected: Canada’s Digital Divide – Nov. 16). We often experienced this first hand when our bus left city limits. Today the Internet is a critical tool to connect citizens to banking, tourism, education and health services. Without it, communities cannot develop their economies and create jobs and opportunity for their citizens. Canadians without adequate Internet service will become second-class citizens.
Last May, I outlined my party’s commitment to dedicate $500-million from the next spectrum auction to achieve the goal of 100 per cent high-speed Internet connectivity within three years, and expand mobile phone coverage for rural Canada.
All Canadians should have equal opportunity to succeed, no matter where they live. We must take leadership now to make access to high-speed Internet universal for all Canadians.
The linkage between the next spectrum auction and rural broadband is important. The way the licenses are divided will determine whether rural service providers will be able to compete for spectrum to deliver next generation broadband.
You can’t experience rural broadband challenges first hand when travelling on a bus, without first acknowleding that mobile broadband is indeed a way to provide service to rural Canadians. Along with other wireless technologies, mobile service is part of the solution for rural and remote areas. But as those on board the Liberal Express discovered, some of the companies that have spectrum aren’t deploying services for universal coverage.
The way spectrum has been getting auctioned, rural areas are bundled in with the urban centres. So, the carriers who buy more spectrum to serve the densely populated big cities end up controlling the less dense areas as well – in a sense, they get the rural licenses for free. How can we ensure that rural spectrum isn’t being hoarded without being deployed to the benefit of rural residents?
Let’s also be sure that we are setting expectations appropriately. I hope this isn’t news for you – not every Canadian will have access to fibre optic gigabit speeds, despite such speeds being available in the urban areas. This is a reality. We need to stop viewing differences in internet delivery as creating different classes of Canadians.
In any case, the challenge of connecting a rural health clinic is very different from connecting all Canadians who live in sparsely populated remote and rural areas. What is affordable ultra-high connectivity for that health clinic is very different from what a consumer might be willing to pay. Rural Canadians don’t need gigabit speeds to benefit from e-Health; Costco won’t be selling MRI machines to have people transmit their diagnostic images from home so let’s get real. Most of the applications mentioned by the Opposition Leader aren’t bandwidth intensive and some, such as banking, don’t even need broadband.
The letter speaks of economic opportunities that arise from internet connectivity, but ignores the biggest problem facing Canadian connections: the large number of Canadians who don’t subscribe to services at their doorstep.
When will we see policy proposals that focus on broadband adoption, rather than broadband plumbing?
A couple of points about the last spectrum auction: about half of the licenses *were* very finely divided and cities were auctioned fairly separately than rural areas. It’s just that the major carriers (and major entrants like Wind/Orascom) that won the spectrum in urban areas also just outbid any of the few smaller regional bidders that tried to enter the auction. Tbaytel and the city of Thunderbay, for example, was outbid on all 6 AWS band licenses covering Thunderbay.
Another thing to remember is that the high-frequency AWS bands weren’t particularly well suited for rural areas. At those frequencies, it’s better for short-range urban coverage. The 700MHz band on the other hand will be much better for covering large areas.
Both wireless and wired broadband are good things. But they aren’t necessarily equivalent. The fact that in Canada these days, the two appear to be good substitutes says more about how badly urban wire-broadband has stagnated in this country than it does about the strength of wireless.
Either way though, at some point people got to start accepting that the cost of living far from civilization is that it’s going to be more expensive to connect you to civilization.
Meanwhile, the debate over rural connectivity, becomes more about the gross imbalance of electoral voting power of rural areas than about practical economic policy.