Internet equity gap grows for rural areas during pandemic: CIRA

Internet speeds for rural Canadians continue to remain “well below” the recommended CRTC speeds, even during the COVID-19 pandemic, when people “are counting more than ever on reliable broadband service” according to a report from the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA). A report released by the CIRA on Tuesday revealed that during the year of the pandemic, the gap in rural versus urban internet performance has grown with urban speeds reaching a median speed of 51.09 Mbps compared to 9.74 Mbps for rural areas. In 2016, the CRTC established a Universal Service Objective, in which it said every Canadian should have internet speeds of at least 50 Mbps for downloads and 10 Mbps for uploads. “I think that's the real challenge we've seen. In spite of all of our need for great internet during the course of the pandemic we've seen urban environments increase somewhat and rural environments really see no benefit at all,” president and CEO of the CIRA Byron Holland said in an interview. At the start of March 2020, the median urban download speed was 26.16 Mbps while rural speeds stood at 5.42 Mbps. Holland said the CIRA has data from all, if not most, postal codes in the 1,000 communities it works with. That plus the collection of data such as latency, jitter and ping times, allows CIRA to create a heat map that translates the data into a map of every neighbourhood and the dispersion of internet performance. CIRA is still in the preliminary stages of analyzing the research but Holland said it will be useful for further breaking down rural data such as comparing First Nation communities to other rural areas. CIRA’s test nodes are located in internet exchange points (IXPs) - also known as an off net test - rather than inside the ISPs architecture. Holland said this allows the organization to measure the actual performance of an internet connection in network conditions that represents “real world internet performance,” whereas an on net test uses an ISP’s own network, gear and test probe. Mark Goldberg, a telecommunications consultant, has criticized the CIRA’s performance test stating that its data “seems to significantly understate the actual internet speeds being delivered to Canadians”. Goldberg said that data is not meaningful because the biggest internet service providers in Canada do not actually make use of IXPs and peer with each other. In addition, he says there is nothing that controls for the fact that there might be another device in the house making use of the internet connection while an off net test occurs. “Our test is based on a globally recognised internet infrastructure that's well documented and well used in many other geographic environments, not just Canada,” Holland said. Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly reported that Goldberg said CIRA's data is not meaningful "because the biggest internet service providers in Canada actually make use of IXPs". In fact Goldberg stated that the data is not meaningful because the largest ISPs do not make use of IXPs. We apologize for the error

Internet equity gap grows for rural areas during pandemic: CIRA

Brief | April 14, 2021

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Internet equity gap grows for rural areas during pandemic: CIRA

Brief | April 14, 2021

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