More targeted data critical to bridge rural broadband divide

Matt Rapke doesn’t need a map to figure out that identifying ‘unnamed’ rural and remote places is a fundamental aspect of deploying broadband in those areas, because he comes from one such town. “If you looked at my house on a map, it's not part of any community,” Rapke told The Wire Report in an April phone call. He is a geographic information system (GIS) specialist for the SouthWestern Integrated Fibre Technology Inc. (SWIFT) project. According to its CEO Geoff Hogan, non-profit SWIFT seeks to fund fibre optic internet infrastructure construction in southern Ontario — covering 25 per cent of the province’s population. One of the ongoing challenges of the project is determining the location of places where there is population, but no corresponding community label in geographical databases. Rapke’s work combines different layers of separate geographic information to reveal specific unnamed population clusters, like those similar to the one he lived in. The Wire Report spoke to experts who say comprehending data associated with rural broadband is necessary to bridge the “digital divide” experienced by 59 per cent of rural households which can’t access now-mandated internet speeds of 50 Mbps, according to the CRTC’s 2017 Communication Monitoring Report. And Rapke is not the only one who is delving into the data that is said to help fuel Canada’s push to connect everyone in the country to high speed internet. Industry academics say locating where to deploy broadband infrastructure most effectively, as well as what happens when those places get internet, has evolved into something which merits study across the country. In Ontario, the University of Guelph’s Regional and Rural Broadband (R2B2) project uses data to measure the effects of rural broadband after it’s deployed. R2B2 also acts as the data collectors of the information SWIFT is analyzing. Out west, a researcher from the University of Alberta is working on strategies for Indigenous communities to reclaim location and network data and assert ownership of it. Applications to previous broadband subsidy programs from Innovation Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) needed to adhere to the so-called “hexagon” model to determine where served and unserved Canadians were located. That entails dividing the country into 25 square-kilometer sections. The system was criticized for not being specific enough to accurately capture all areas lacking high-speed broadband infrastructure. According to the CRTC’s website, for mapping purposes, a 25 square-kilometre hexagon was served if there was one household which could access the 5Mbps of download and 1Mbps of upload speed. But in June, ISED revealed that while it publically visualizes the national broadband access data through the hexagon system, internally it has much more accurate datasets to determine where broadband infrastructure is needed. SWIFT, which just announced the request for proposals on its first project, has been active since its 2016 incorporation and it’s funded by the federal and Ontario governments, to the tune of $180 million. When combined with money from municipal governments and the private sector, the project will have nearly $300 million to use for funding fibre infrastructure, according to its website. SWIFT’s goal is to connect 350 communities, covering an area of 41,286 square kilometres — stretching between Windsor, north of Barrie and St. Catharines — and bring 3.5 million Ontario residents direct fibre access. That $300-million first leg of the project is slated to continue until 2022, but that’s only the initial step. What’s enabled SWIFT’s high precision mapping was the analysis of land parcel information -- data about individual plots of land with homes on them -- which revealed where the dense clusters of dwellings exist. Hogan believes bringing fibre connections to those areas will help connect the more sparse areas in between, as well as feed fixed wireless broadcasting towers to help connect the truly remote users in Ontario. In contrast, Alberta-based internet advocacy group Cybera said in a 2016 report that the hexagon system can “lead to an overrepresentation of broadband coverage.” While ISED has access to other, more detailed, data representations, according to regulatory filings they have not replaced the hexagon model. The hexagon model was a criteria used in both application processes of 2014’s $305-million Connecting Canadians and 2016’s $500-million Connect to Innovate funding programs, according to government websites. As well, it was suggested by the CRTC as a way to consider funding eligibility during the 2017 call for comments to determine criteria for its upcoming $750 million broadband fund, created after the universal service objective decision in Dec. 2016. In the interventions, pushback emerged from players in the rural broadband industry. The Canadian Network Operators Consortium (CNOC) noted in a submission to the CRTC, “these large geographical units will invariably lead to problems” when one hexagon hosts multiple communities with different infrastructure needs. The Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) in its submission called on the regulator to take on a larger role in collecting detailed geographic data. The complaint made it to testimony in front of the House of Commons standing committee on Industry, Science and Technology, which studied rural broadband earlier this year. The industry committee tabled its criticism of the hexagon model in its report on the issue for the federal government. ISED acknowledged the problem in the government’s response to the industry committee report. “Despite outward appearances,” the government said that it did not use the hexagon system for “detailed analysis, program administration, or project selection.” Instead, it uses a combined dataset of broadband backbone infrastructure and last-mile service availability sourced from providers, according to a follow-up email from an ISED spokesperson. The department said it also cross-checks it with census data from Statistics Canada, and combines it with road data and provincial address info. ISED has posted publicly-accessible datasets of the population information to the federal government’s open data portal. In a follow up interview, Hogan told The Wire Report that he feels SWIFT’s data collection is even higher resolution than what ISED has published. The land parcel data ends up tracking the actual locations of residences, as opposed to ISED’s broader representative data, he said in an email. The department pointed to competitive reasons as to why it displays the data through the less-than precise hexagon system, so as not to give away exact locations of critical infrastructure of private companies. On top of that, even though ISED releases its population datasets, it requires someone trained in GIS visualization to understand, according to Rob McMahon, an assistant professor at the University of Alberta. “That stacks the deck against groups that may not have professional visualization experts on their team, but know that there's no connectivity in their community and may want to apply” to federal programs, McMahon said Leveling the playing field is why McMahon wants to encourage the principles of OCAP, or ownership, control, access and possession, in the aggregation of internet access data in Indigenous areas. These values stem from previous negative experiences in Indigenous health data processing by non-Indigenous parties, and he wants to avoid as mistakes of the past. He is also the coordinator of the First Mile Connectivity Consortium (FMCC), which is a non-profit made up of Indigenous-owned telecommunication companies with a goal to develop evidence-based policy to foster broadband development, according to its website. “We are interested in the supports and barriers that may affect the ability of local groups to directly engage in efforts to map and analyze digital divides — not only through collecting and visualizing locally-produced data, but also in reclaiming and re-presenting data about their experiences that is often held in centralized or metropolitan organizations,” read a research paper published last year by McMahon. The FMCC worked towards this goal by launching an on-location network testing program through a partnership with Cybera. Announced in June, the groups will work with the Canadian Internet Registration Authority’s (CIRA) Community Investment Program to deploy small computers, which can test the speed and quality of internet connections in homes, community halls and hospitals, McMahon said. That way, it can pinpoint exactly where urgent connectivity issues exist and prioritize building infrastructure accordingly. This will fill in data gaps, according to McMahon, where there is very little information available for Indigenous populations like remote places in the north. One issue is the lack of knowledge of the existence of these testing methods, so he hopes the program will accomplish two things. “The outcome would be policy advocacy but we're also doing it in a way where we hope it becomes an education resource,” he said. The academic approach is being used elsewhere with the R2B2 program, which has worked closely with SWIFT. The project seeks to define exactly what happens after modern internet service is deployed in rural areas, through cost benefit, causality, and consumer surplus analysis, said Helen Hambly Odame, associate professor at Guelph in a telephone interview. “As a taxpayer and as a consumer myself of telco products, I have to say, sometimes we do feel that it's not very clear what happened with the previous investment. What was returned? What was the the economic and social benefit of that investment?” she said. Hambly Odame pointed to issues facing rural areas, such as population decline and ageing, school closures, agriculture and healthcare provisioning as different dynamics rural residents are concerned about. Her team is working directly with health and educational institutions in rural areas to quantify their needs. She sees academic study in these issues as a neutral space to process the corresponding data. Hambly Odame’s previous experience has taught her that this information can be lost very easily, and it takes commitment to public service to collect and maintain it. “I think a public institution like the university plays this really crucial role in ensuring the best possible analytics, really well thought through systematic data collection that underlies that analysis, and then this notion of the stewardship of data. Ensuring that baseline and endline data is available to really report on return on investment, and to develop an analysis of social benefit,” she said. Rapke, who splits his time between the R2B2 project and SWIFT, grew up four kilometers outside of Markdale, Ontario. That’s an hour and a half’s drive away from Guelph where he attended university, earning a graduate degree in rural planning and development. What he found, in the push to connect the rural and remote communities, was that there weren’t just gaps in understanding where internet was needed, but gaps in conceptualization of those places. “It's my perception that a lot of people involved in the project are urbanites. They have a conception of what a community is. In their mind, if they're from Guelph, Guelph as a place extends to the boundaries of Guelph,” Rapke said. He added he wants to connect the people that choose to live by a lake, or in-between the places with malls, arenas and grocery stores, or generally considered communities. “When you get into rural areas,” Rapke said, “it breaks down and if we make communities our targets — as in the urban centers that we conceptualize them as — you're missing the areas that need internet the most.” — With reporting by Bryson Masse at bmasse@thewirereport.ca and editing by Ahmad Hathout at ahathout@thewirereport.ca

More targeted data critical to bridge rural broadband divide

News | August 3, 2018

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More targeted data critical to bridge rural broadband divide

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