ABCtech #145 30NOV14 Broadband as Utility Communities Take the Lead

ABCtech #145 30NOV14 Broadband as Utility: Communities Take the Lead

The Alberta Council of Technologies Society has advocated for rural connectivity and adequate broadband for the sustaining communities and ensuring the competitiveness of Canadian business.  The following three editorials make the case from different perspectives. – Editor

Broadband as Utility: Communities Take the Lead

Advancement, adoption and application of digital information and communication technology (ICT) will continue to drive exponential growth in demand for telecom capacity for the foreseeable future. Ambition to realize the full economic benefits of ICT is driving many nations and communities – including rural and remote communities – to invest in broadband telecommunication as a new utility.

Objectives in the emerging utility paradigm for broadband telecommunication are to accommodate exponential growth; to provide universal access to broadband networks and the expanding universe of services they support; and to accelerate competition and innovation in services. This is driving explosive growth in deployment of optical fibre access networks, which offer future-proof capacity to
accommodate service competition and growth in demand for high-capacity services like videoconferencing and Netflix streaming for 4K televisions.

Deployment of fibre utilities is now accelerating in rural and remote communities, which have the most to gain from broadband but typically the poorest access. These fibre deployments support full and effective participation in the immense and expanding global digital economy, enabling rural and remote communities to compete for economic development opportunities on a more level playing field.
Utility fibre is becoming an economic necessity for all communities as ever more businesses seek future-proof solutions to meet growing needs for broadband capacity, and lower service costs through better competition among vendors.

The town of Olds (pop. 8,300) is the first community in rural Alberta to build and manage its own fibre utility O-net. The town is now scrambling to keep pace with demand for fibre access from businesses wanting to move to the community. Ten rural counties have deployed fibre-connected towers that enable competing vendors to serve sparsely populated areas via wireless networks.

Communities in the Alberta Southwest Alliance are exploring collaborative solutions for broadband development. This strategy has been successful for remote communities in northern Ontario and rural communities in eastern Ontario. Rural communities in southwestern Ontario are now building on these examples with the goal of restoring demographic and economic vitality to a region that has lost much of its manufacturing industry over the last two decades – Swiftnetwork.

These communities all recognize that they are competing with the entire world to foster, attract and retain the talented people and innovative enterprises that will drive the economies of the 21st century. Other rural communities can learn much from these and other examples of collaborative leadership at the community level as they embrace the challenge of building and protecting economic resilience.
 – J. Van Leeuwen – Ventus Development Services

From Scarcity to Abundance in Broadband: Protecting Canada’s Economic Competitiveness

“Yes, we’ve got a difficult geography, and some things will work and some things won’t. “But if we take that geography to mean ‘Gosh it’s hard, let’s not do it’, then we may as well accept the fact that we’re going to continue to be hewers of wood and drawers of water and not be able to get into the Knowledge Economy. Hard doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it, it just means you have to work harder.”  – Robin Winsor, CEO of Cybera

Cybera has advocated for a refreshing and principled approach to regulation of wholesale telecom at the CRTC hearings presently underway in Ottawa. Economic competitiveness for all Canadian communities, urban or rural, means shifting from a scarcity-driven business paradigm based on competition between networks to an abundance-driven paradigm based on competition between services on shared, open access fibre networks.

A video recording of Cybera’s November 24th presentation to the CRTC can be viewed HERE, starting at 81:20.