Speeds ‘red herring’ when North needs backbone builds, panel hears

GATINEAU, Que. — Setting a basic speed requirement doesn’t do the North any good when it comes to improving Internet access, unless there’s necessary backbone infrastructure in place, a CRTC panel on basic telecom services heard Tuesday. On the second day of the three-week proceeding, commissioners heard from a variety of witnesses who operate in the northern territories. The focus on download and upload speeds is a red herring, Jeff Philipp, CEO of SSi Micro Ltd., which is headquartered in Yellowknife, N.W.T. “That is not to say that minimum burst speed targets should not be set,” he added. “However, if a user can never achieve the advertised speed, and their streamed content is constantly buffering, then we have not advanced anything.” Philipp pointed to oversubscription as one of the problems facing the northern networks and said fixing the bottleneck in the backbone infrastructure is more important than the last-mile connections up North. SSi is carrying out upgrades that “can deliver the same quality of broadband as you find in downtown Toronto,” Dean Proctor, SSi’s chief development officer said, but company representatives noted the bottleneck problem will still be a source of frustration. “It’s wonderful that we can go 220 on the Autobahn in Europe but it would not be wonderful if there were five times as many cars on the Autobahn. You just couldn’t get that speed,” Philipp said. As SSi outlined in its original submission to the proceeding, northern businesses have a variety of hurdles to overcome — such as lack of available resources, skilled labour and high costs — that make backbone infrastructure construction more difficult than in the southern part of the country. SSi proposed a backbone assistance program, where the recipient would receive funds to build new infrastructure and would “allow competing local service providers to deliver quality and affordable communication services to end users,” Proctor said. Backbone is one of the fundamental challenges for Nunavut, said Oana Spinu, Nunavut Broadband Development Corporation executive director. She added that “it will be a lot easier to provide services if there is much more affordable backbone connectivity.” The needs in the North are different from the rest of the country, not least of which are the concessions that have to be made to accommodate the high cost of living. The north is “very different from rural (communities),” Sara Brown, CEO of the Northwest Territories Association of Communities, told the commissioners. “We are not rural. We can’t drive to the next town.” Simply upgrading an operating system, such as going from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10 could take upwards of 10 hours and the majority of a monthly data allotment, representatives from the government of Nunavut said in their opening statement to the panel. Capacity and data cap issues are exacerbated by the fact that households in the North are larger and younger than in the rest of the country, noted Spinu. According to Statistics Canada 2011 census figures, almost 33 per cent of Nunavut’s population in 2011 was made up of children aged 0-14, compared to less than 17 per cent in Canada overall. The 2011 census also placed the average household size in Nunavut at 3.7 people, compared to 2.5 people in the average Canadian household. About 12 per cent of those average Canadian households have better home Internet access than the territory’s 42 K-12 schools, which share 50MB of bandwidth, said Spinu. Usage caps are “a major problem,” said Philipp, adding he as a service provider didn’t like having to deliver caps, but that it was necessary to do so to operate within the confines of the current funding mechanism. When asked what his company does to ensure service affordability, Philipp said point-blank that the satellite-provided Internet packages were not affordable. “It’s that simple, frankly; $80 a month is not affordable in my mind in the North, certainly not in the Arctic where unemployment is as high as it is,” Philipp said. Available on the Qiniq network in 25 Nunavut communities, SSi charges $80 as the starting price for a package with 3 Mbps download speed and 20GB of data. Excess data charges start at $15 for 1 GB. A 50-GB package with 5 Mbps download speeds is $399 per month. “We went to no contract, month-to-month, pay-as-you-go because people couldn’t afford it,” Philipp said, noting that many people live paycheque to paycheque and food insecurity is a major issue. “So is $80 affordable? Not a chance. Is it being bought by thousands of subscribers? Absolutely. But should we be doing more? No question. Do we have the funding to do more? I’ll repeat: this is the box (we were given). So no, it’s not affordable.” Representatives from the Nunavut government and Brown both proposed a 2019 target basic service objective with 9 Mbsp download speeds and 1.5 Mbps upload speeds, based on a report prepared in 2014 by a working group. But Spinu and the Nunavut Broadband Development Corporation were unwilling to specify a target speed because once that number is set, it becomes a plateau that can’t be breached until a new funding program rolls around, she said. “My initial response would be that 5/1 is not sufficient for that five-year window, but what a higher target should be I can come back to you on if you want a specific number,” Spinu said. The corporation is proposing that the CRTC take the lead on an Arctic broadband strategy for fibre, since it said they’re less susceptible to political pressures and election cycles than other agencies. The government of Yukon also outlined challenges around access in the North on Monday. Satellite providers Xplornet Communications Inc. and satellite operator Telesat Holdings Inc. are scheduled for Wednesday. — With reporting by Charelle Evelyn at cevelyn@thewirereport.ca and editing by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca

Speeds ‘red herring’ when North needs backbone builds, panel hears

News | April 12, 2016

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Speeds ‘red herring’ when North needs backbone builds, panel hears

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