A number of government funded research networks operate in Canada, under the supervision of non-profit, independent boards, such as CANARIE and ORION. As we approach budget time for governments across Canada, serious questions should be asked about whether increased public benefits can be derived from our national and regional research networks.
These fibre-based networks provide communications capabilities for virtually all of Canada’s universities, many school boards hospitals and private sector research institutions [see ORION’s “Who’s connected” page for a sample listing]. Are these projects doing enough to help promote the roll-out of advanced networking to Canadians?
I often wonder if the private network approach is the best way to stimulate increased backbone capacity throughout Canada. If these research network requirements were embedded within multi-carrier commercial networks, why couldn’t the same technical capabilities be possible? Could such an architecture accelerate the commercialization of new networking technologies and the delivery of higher speed services to more Canadians? Would the public funding requirements be the same or less? Would the research facilities requirements help justify increased investment by the commercial carriers in more remote communities?
Does the migration of major “anchor tenants” to the private research networks in smaller locales handicap the rest of the community by reducing some of the financial incentive for investment by commercial internet service providers? Universities, hospitals, school boards, municipal institutions can (and should) purchase their communications strategically to advance policy objectives for the benefit of their local stakeholders.