Canada shows communities can do the job

By RICHARD WOOD

Canada's approach to broadband access is succeeding compared with New Zealand's by avoiding the scarcity mentality and letting communities take control.

That's the word from chairman of the national 20/20 Communications Trust Ian Thomson, who has been on a research trip to Canada subsidised by the Ministry of Research Science and Technology.

Thomson has submitted a report to the ministry following the trip, in which he travelled to the Global Congress of Community Networking in Montreal.

He also visited 15 Canadian community-based broadband projects across the country.

Thomson said broadband was a high priority in Canada. It faced similar issues to New Zealand, in that the incumbent telco operators could not justify the cost of rolling out broadband, particularly in rural areas.

Instead, communities there were treating it as their own infrastructure investment and utilising inexpensive fibre optic cable to provide an excess of bandwidth.

Whether you put in 20 or 800 fibre optic strands, said Thomson, the cost difference was negligible because the main cost was in laying the cable.

"Their approach is to put in 10 times as much because it doesn't cost any more."

Thomson said that in Ontario 30 per cent of primary schools were now connected with 100Mbps [megabits per second] links.

"Compare that to the New Zealand Government's Probe project at 512kbps [kilobits per second]," he said.

"Probe is still treating bandwidth as a scarce resource because they are only asking for 512k.

"Why didn't they ask for 10Mbps? Because they thought it was a scarce resource and would cost too much money."

He said the approach in Ontario was 10Mbps to the home, 100 to small-to-medium enterprises and libraries, and 1Gbps to commercial and municipal buildings.

The "dark fibre" implementation approach being used in Canada was basically fibre sitting in the ground. Those who wanted to use it had to buy the equipment to light it up.

Thomson said that approach removed the cost of having a telco firm managing it.

"With today's technology, bandwidth is an abundant resource," he said. "You don't need to spend that money. The intelligence resides at the ends of the fibre and is owned by the person connecting to the fibre.

"That equipment is very cheap now - not at the telco scale, more at the enterprise scale."

The installation of fibre in Canada is being subsidised by the regional Governments, backed by the central Government.

Municipalities, hospitals, libraries, businesses and community groups need first to demonstrate they can raise half the money.

Thomson said the base infrastructure cost was working out at around $25,000 to $30,000 to connect each building, and that was a one-off fee for an estimated 20-year life.

In one example of the impact of the approach in sparsely populated British Columbia, a remote village was until recently on a party line service and had no cellphone coverage.

After the installation of the fibre, the telco bought a fibre strand and upgraded its phone exchange for high-speed data.

A cellphone company and a cable TV firm took advantage of the fibre as well.