Data gaps a connectivity issue for indigenous communities

Organizations working on mapping internet connectivity issues in rural and remote communities are being encouraged to take their work further to bridge a gap that some indigenous community representatives are saying is left by the incompleteness of government data. The issue is that some communities are either being left out of the digital age or the quality of their connectivity is being overstated partly because the data isn’t being pulled directly from the source. It’s the missing link that the not-for-profit First Nations Technology Council, which helps indigenous communities come up to digital speed, is looking for when it visits over 200 First Nations in British Columbia as part of an ongoing project, its CEO Denise Williams said Friday. “There is a problem when we look at databases that will say that there is connectivity to that Nation and that it should be at a certain level, but when you actually visit that community and you test that speed in person and you look at the infrastructure, you realize there’s a different story to tell,” Williams said as a panelist at the Indigenous Connectivity Summit in Inuvik, Northwest Territories. Williams, while praising the efforts of the federal and provincial governments to fund its initiatives as a “step forward,” added that those policy makers are “working from an incomplete set of data and so it’s really hard for us to anecdotally tell those stories over and over again that we don’t have that connectivity that you say we do.” A similar argument has been raised before: The Wire Report previously spoke to several experts -- including the SouthWestern Integrated Fibre Technology Inc. (SWIFT) project, which is working on fibre construction in southern Ontario -- who say a lack of complete data is standing in the way of filling those tiny remote pockets with internet. The complaint is there are places going unconnected because there are no community labels to denote that there are people living there. Part of the criticism comes from the government’s use of a model that critics say isn’t specific enough to pinpoint underserved areas. While Innovation Canada recently said the “hexagon” model is the one it uses to publicly visualize the data, it said it uses a more accurate dataset internally. SWIFT said it has been working on a model that will layer different geographic information to reveal those unnamed population clusters. But still others are working on providing more complete sets of information. The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA), which appeared at the conference, said it will work with Alberta-based internet advocacy group Cybera to deploy computers to test the speed and quality of internet connections so it can identify which areas need urgent attention. CIRA had also been working with technology developed by M-Lab to do something similar. “I want to applaud M-Lab and CIRA for the measurement work that you’re doing, but I want to encourage you to go further,” Steve Song, senior fellow at the internet non-profit organization Mozilla Corp., said from the conference crowd on Friday. “Right now, in terms of connecting everyone, we need to pay more attention to where the internet isn’t and we need different tools for doing that,” he said, adding one way to do that is by showing regulators that there is spectrum that is currently unused. TV white space, Song implied, can be used to fulfill part of that objective -- to find unused “opportunistic” spectrum. Its first use is anticipated to be for wireless internet service in rural and remote areas. “We need to challenge the coverage claims of the incumbent operators in terms of how far they say they go because that’s all the evidence we have -- we just have their word, basically,” Song said. “So let’s go further -- let’s take the tools and find out where the internet is not.” — With reporting by Ahmad Hathout at ahathout@thewirereport.ca and editing by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca

Data gaps a connectivity issue for indigenous communities

News | October 12, 2018

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Data gaps a connectivity issue for indigenous communities

News | October 12, 2018

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