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I’d like to update Hoover’s 1928 promise of prosperity: We need a connected computer for every home.

Will activists join me in calling for universal access to computers? I have been sitting on a blog posting for about a month now. As we approach the end of the year, I think this makes for a suitable set of messages.

The Globe and Mail’s feature last month on “Disconnected: Canada’s digital divide” helped to keep Canadians interested in the development of a national digital strategy. The on-line version was re-titled as “Rural Canada loses as politics and business fail to get broadband down the last mile.” That title is inaccurate and the article itself was confusing.

An example:

By some estimates, about 700,000 homes in Canada lack broadband Internet access, and many Canadians who do connect to the Internet do so at speeds slower than 1.5 megabits per second – barely faster than dial-up, which can take an hour to download an average music album.

How is 1.5 Mbps “barely faster than dial-up”?

Dial-up in rural communities is rarely able to exceed 14.4 Kbps, less than 1% the speed of the 1.5 Mbps. How is more than 100 times faster – 2 orders of magnitude – reduced to an descriptive like ‘barely faster”? A call-out box in the print version of the article compares the time to download a 700 MB video for 1.5 Mbps service versus 70 Mbps. About 20% of Canadians choose to connect to the internet using 1.5Mbps or less. How many  of us choose 70 Mbps service? It is inaccurate when the article says that 1.5 Mbps is too slow to stream videos on-line.

The article also bounces back and forth mixing present capabilities with future requirements. For example:

It’s too slow to stream videos online, and certainly far too slow for future applications such as telemedicine, where diagnoses and checkups can be done through high-definition, real-time video connections.

Actually, 1.5Mbps is sufficient to stream videos – granted not HDTV. But the article is completely off when talking about telemedicine. Virtually all consumer telemedicine applications are low bit rate telemetry. Canadians will have residential diagnostic imaging devices around the same time that my car gets powered with a Mr. Fusion machine. Comparing the current state of affordable residential broadband with future business-grade connectivity requirements is sloppy – mixing the future with the present; confusing residential and business services.

Mixing the future ambitions of other countries with Canada’s present is a frequent problem. For example, when describing the inadequacies of 1.5 Mbps, the article says:

By comparison, the U.S. government’s “National Broadband Plan” sets a target speed of “affordable” 100 megabits-per-second Internet service connecting at least 100 million homes by 2020.

Let’s take a look at this objective [pdf],  in closer detail. The US has about 120 million households, increasing by about 1 million each year. So, in 10 years, the FCC would like to see around 75% of households connected to a service that most urban Canadians and Americans have access to today.

But what is the relevance to the 700,000 rural Canadians who are the subject of the article? The “by comparison” is meaningless without talking about what the FCC envisions for the 25% of Americans not captured by the “100 Squared” ambition.

The article mentions Finland having declared broadband as a legal right, without mentioning that it is for a 1 Mbps service. If 1.5 Mbps is “barely faster than dial-up” as the article writes, then what is really implied by a Finlandian declaration of rights, as opposed to what Canadians can truly access without political grandstanding.

In the article, I am quoted saying

I think we’ve got parts of Toronto that have more people who don’t have [Internet] access than all parts of rural Canada

I am pretty sure that I would not have said that there are any parts of Toronto that don’t have internet access. As frequent readers of my blog know, I have campaigned on these pages for more attention to be spent on broadband adoption – which is the correct term for the demand side of the equation.

The web-version of the article includes an audio recording of an interview with Industry Minister Tony Clement that has an important statement not captured in the written version:

Technologies have advanced that collapse some of these borders and allow a lot of those needs to be looked after. We have to keep nurturing that and creating incentives for that to be deployed.

All of us involved in the communications industry have similar objectives: to increase the availability and adoption of advanced communications services and technologies. We may disagree on how to achieve this, but as we approach the new year, we need to keep looking forward.

I have a specific target in mind. Before we can have universal adoption of broadband, we need to look at how to get computers into every home, starting with households that have school-aged children.

With a possible election in 2011, will the agenda of any political party include a modern promise for digital prosperity: a connected computer in every home?

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?

Three years ago, I wrote a piece that (unfortunately) is as relevant today as it was then.

I commented then that it is one thing to bring broadband internet to the masses, but how do we make them drink from the fountain of knowledge?

One of the challenges, of course, is that the industry has not yet sold turn-key applications that capture the imaginations of the unconnected. Surprising as it seems, email, Facebook, file swapping and web surfing have not yet attracted 100% of the population.

[Note that Twitter had not yet warranted a mention 3 years ago.]

I observed:

Are there some applications that might lend themselves to a toll-free model in order to reach the rest of the market?

For example, would home health care warrant installing a broadband connection as part of a monitoring service? The broadband access would be enabling underlying service, but the costs would be incurred by the health care agency, not the infirmed. Like toll-free calling, the application provider would pay the charges.

Your aging grandmother may have no idea that she would have a broadband connection coming into her apartment – perhaps complete with a wireless router. All she would know is that she can stay at home for routine monitoring check-ups.

Besides health care and elder-care, what other applications might “reverse-the-charges” for broadband access? Security services? Gaming? Entertainment? Energy management?

Among other considerations such as driving more universal connectivity, a reverse-the-charges model might put a very different spin on net neutrality – these applications will be asking the ISPs to bill them for a specific kind of access.

If Telemedicine has so many economic benefits, should provincial health plans be paying to install broadband with vital sign or blood sugar monitors into the homes of unconnected individuals with compromised health conditions?

Should our social services safety net include benefits to provide a computer and broadband to households with school age children?

We have the means to identify those Canadians that need government intervention to ensure affordable internet for all.

In his opening remarks at the CRTC hearings in Timmins yesterday, CRTC Chair Konrad von Finckenstein described the current regime for basic services:

1. We required telephone companies to serve their existing customers as well as new customers requesting telephone service. This is known as the obligation to serve.
2. We developed a basic service objective, which is a minimum target for residential service that includes:
   • local service on an individual telephone line
   • access to low-speed Internet at local rate (i.e. dial-up Internet service)
   • operator and directory assistance services
   • access to the long-distance network
   • enhanced calling features, and
   • a copy of the current local telephone directory. 
3. We developed a regulatory regime whereby companies that provide local telephone service to residential customers in rural and remote areas receive a subsidy.

The current proceeding is looking at whether there are changes in order to this regime. In the opening volley, it was suggested that maybe rural rates should rise to more closely match costs. If higher rates for phone service in urban centres are affordable, why would these same prices be unaffordable in lower density areas?

Yes, that would lead to unhappy rural ratepayers who have been the beneficiaries of wealth transfer from urban markets for the past century. The current system skims pennies from a lot of us each month in order to reduce the prices for relatively fewer folks in rural areas. Those pennies add up to a material amount when distributed to folks who are eligible for the subsidy.

Is geography, without any regard for ability to pay, still the most appropriate criteria for being the beneficiary of such largesse?

Should the definition be expanded to include broadband? If so, what should be the standard?

The Chair posed an interesting question to the panels: what if the CRTC set a target for Canadian service providers? What would that look like?

As this gets prepared to be posted, word is coming out that the future is not clear for Australia’s ambitious $43B National Broadband Network vision. As I suggested yesterday, will more governments stop interfering with the supply of broadband and focus more on stimulating demand?

A new report from Berkeley Research Group has found that Canadian consumers are among the world’s most intensive and sophisticated users of Internet services. In addition, the report [pdf, 700KB] says that Canada’s mobile networks and usage of such networks are among the most sophisticated in the developed world.

The authors of the report are Leonard Waverman, Dean, Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary and Kalyan Dasgupta, Principal, Berkeley Research Group. They found that Canadian businesses have been slower to adopt information and communication technologies than their counterparts in other countries.

… despite Canadians being among the most intensive users of the Internet anywhere, Internet-based retail lags in Canada compared to countries such as the U.K., even though broadband penetration in Canada is higher and average user speeds are also higher. Thus the primary “problem” in Canada would appear to be a wider business failure to sufficiently invest in or make use of technology that transforms business processes rather than a failure by the providers of telecommunications and broadband networks to provide affordable and high-quality services.

The report says that the inordinate focus on networks and networks alone is damaging “a much more important debate about the wider digital economy in Canada.”

The report considers the weak performance of Canada in electronic retailing, pointing out that getting Canadian electronic commerce to the level of U.K. electronic commerce doesn’t require faster broadband networks (given that broadband networks in the U.K. are slower than ours). So why did a 2008 study find that half of Canadian online users never make online purchases, compared with just one fifth in the U.K. and one eight in the US?

The report quotes Blair Levin, the recently departed head of the FCC’s National Broadband Plan for the United States:

As the leaders of the team that prepared the National Broadband Plan that was presented to Congress in March, we have seen that the public debate on broadband focuses too much on how our networks compare with those in other countries. Instead, the discussion should focus on how to use those networks here in America and rethink how we deliver key services.

We need to spend more time understanding issues impacting the demand side of the equation. How do we help consumers and businesses make better use of the infrastructure we have?