Only So Super

The Alberta SuperNet was supposed to make our province the best connected place on the planet. So what happened?

Oct 1, 2008

by Fil Fraser

The Demand Side: Too Costly

“There is no business case for private-sector entrepreneurs, let alone households, to connect directly to the Alberta SuperNet.” So says Brian McNary, operations manager for Optic-Lynx, a Camrose-based company which offers Internet services to schools and libraries already connected to the SuperNet. “Many don’t understand that the Internet and the SuperNet are two different things,” he says. “The SuperNet is the highway. The Internet is like a bus that can carry some of the traffic.” The two services combine effectively, but the SuperNet as it stands is a virtual private network (VPN) for public-sector users.

McNary has been working with a hotel in Camrose that already has standard cable and Internet services in its rooms. The Norseman Inn’s owner-manager, Sean Wilms, wants to set up a conference facility connected directly to the SuperNet offering customers live, high-definition videoconferencing. But the business case just isn’t there. According to Wilms, the capital costs are in the $10,000 range and monthly service costs could run as high as $1,000. “At this point we still have to create a market for the service,” he says.

Both McNary and Wilms would welcome government funding to extend the service. Otherwise, they say, the SuperNet is like a highway to which the private sector must provide the on-ramps. And to do that, it would have to charge a whopping toll.– Fil Fraser

One of the SuperNet’s unabashed cheerleaders is Terry Keyko, managing director of the Rural Alberta Development Fund. The Alberta government set up the $100-million fund in 2006 with the money to be spent on community-led projects in rural Alberta by the end of the 2011-12 fiscal year. “The SuperNet is like turning another light bulb on for rural Alberta,” he says. “It has the potential to transform rural life.”

The fund is set up as a not-for-profit company governed by an 11-member board of directors chaired by the venerable Bob Clark, a former Manning-era cabinet minister who has more enduring political roots in Alberta than a prairie dandelion. “If rural Alberta is going to flourish,” Clark says, “it’s going to need the SuperNet in the same way that it needed rural electrification, the gas co-ops and the extension of telephone service decades ago. Someone in government has to take charge of this. This is the next wave. This has to happen.”

The rural development fund, which is not mandated to support capital projects, was nevertheless quickly oversubscribed with applications totalling more than $422 million. By the summer of 2008, it had committed nearly half of its money, $48.5 million to some 40 projects. Among them:

A Rural Information Services Initiative in southern Alberta designed to establish virtual meeting rooms with high speed video Internet access at 80 rural libraries and other public locations. Funding: $3.7 million.
The Sunchild E-Learning Community will allow the Sunchild E-Learning Centre in Rocky Mountain House to expand skills training and develop new online programming for aboriginal leaders. Funding: $220,000.
Finishing the Dream will result in 13 communities in the County of Mountain View using the Alberta SuperNet to access broadband technologies and learning applications through a network of close-to-home “Community Engagement Sites.” Funding: $2.5 million.

So, if only through the back door, government money is continuing to trickle into SuperNet completion. Heather Klimchuck, minister of Service Alberta, whose portfolio includes the SuperNet, says that the government wants to see the network extended but stops short of saying it would commit money directly to the process. A recent report from the economic council of the Alberta Economic Development Authority urges the government to provide capital funding to allow rural ISPs to complete the last mile. Fred Estlin, chair of the authority’s Rural and Regional Development Committee, which developed the recommendation, says he’s optimistic that the government will receive the proposal favourably.

There is clearly no single solution to extending the SuperNet to homes and businesses throughout Alberta. If Telus goes ahead with plans to use the $163 million in it’s deferral account to replace or augment its copper-wire system with fibre-optic cable, a good portion of the last mile could be connected (though Alberta communities would have to share the wealth with Telus’s other rural wireline service areas in British Columbia and Quebec). In the unlikely event that the CRTC gives the Internet Centre the right to use Telus copper wires to deliver the service, another part of the promise could be met, but that would have the effect of freezing much of Telus’s old and outdated system in place.

As we’ve seen to date, the Internet will continue to evolve, if anything more rapidly, and demand greater bandwidth, however many innovators find ways to pack it into the limited wiring rural residents currently rely on. Most of the stakeholders I have talked to see the SuperNet as the modern equivalent of the railway of the 1880s, the rural electrification programs of the 1930s and the extension of natural gas and telephone services to rural populations. None of these initiatives took place without government leadership, and government cash.

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October 2008 Contents

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Graham Fletcher
As the owner of The Internet Centre, and the guy who started the commercial Internet in Alberta, I found Telus PR piece with respect to this issue about unloaded copper wire curiously ill-informed, especially about their own technology.
Some clarification:
In almost all cases where Telus is putting in fibre (large centres btw – not the small communities that Supernet would serve) they lay it ALONGSIDE the copper. Telus knows copper wire is valuable where it is, and their standard HDTV offering is put out in communities on equipment built closer to the home, and is piggybacked on top of the existing copper to push both Internet and HDTV signals down the copper wire the last few hundred metres to the home. The copper remains in place ALWAYS because standard telephones still depend on that wire to the Telus wire center and the Telus phone switch. Moreover, this copper wire is CRITICAL to the delivery of Telus’ evolving services. In a very small amount of cases Telus will pull copper out of some conduit in order to push fibre through, where no other options exist. That Telus states publicly that using continuous copper – a regular telephone line – is stepping back in time is absolutely wrong. OR use of copper thrusts Telus into the dark ages only when we use it, but not when they use it. Hmmm.
Our CRTC submission is absolutely clear. We said that we would take copper how-is, where-is. How does that simple request – which is the point in question in its entirety – translate into Telus pulling out fibre to put back in copper? Answer – it doesn’t.
Pulling copper out, costing Telus millions: complete, 100% baloney.
What Telus does not mention is that access to this copper wire for companies such as ours is normal in Ontario, Quebec, The Territiories, and all states in the U.S. Telus is seemingly almost singular in its inability to accommodate competitors such as us, yet that that is the norm throughout most of North America Not only is Telus wrong about our request being ‘unworkable’, but The Internet Centre was providing such DSL services two years before Telus got into the broadband Internet business using the same technology that Telus now uses, and we again want to use. Another Hmmm.
I will agree that Telus does provide excellent wholesale bandwidth – we buy and resell a lot of it, and Telus’ overall service quality is superb. HOWEVER, we want to provide a much higher broadband Symmetrical service thoughout Alberta – a service Telus does not provide to us as a wholesale product. We believe that with the advent of a hugely capable network – the Supernet – high definition Video conferencing, among other services that us bidirectional high bandwidth, is possible, practical and desirable, reduces travel, increases dialogue without distance being a barrier and has therefore environmental and security aspects that are well met if we can implement this technology. We are of course very pleased that the Supernet is Net Neutral, and does not have traffic shaping as an issue on its horizon.
Contrary to Telus’ rather silly PR piece in this Venture article, Telus has no technical or financial reason to deny us and other competitors access to copper wire lines in Alberta.
We do remain extremely disappointed that Telus is intractable in providing a service that will allow us to connect at a minimum 180 communities in Alberta with those communities’ first broadband service.
P.S.
As an aside, and to clarify what one would be lead to believe that Telus is investing $600 million in Alberta, the actual PR piece of a couple of years ago says this:
“TELUS investing $600 million to enhance broadband infrastructure
Investment enables emerging services and expands network coverage across British Columbia, Alberta and eastern Quebec
Vancouver, B.C. ¬ñ TELUS today announced a $600 million investment to enhance its broadband network in British Columbia, Alberta and eastern Quebec by the end of 2009.
Telus is NOT investing $600 million in upgrades only in Alberta, but is doing upgrades in a number of places, including Alberta……
Glad to be of help.
Graham Fletcher
—————————————————————-
Graham Fletcher (gfletcher@incentre.net)
President, The Internet Centre Inc.
4130 95 Street, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6E 6H5
(780) 450-6787, Fax (780) 450-9143 (www.incentre.net)
IP conference: 206.75.213.252
Dialup, DSL, Wireless, and other Internet Services & Solutions throughout Alberta and British Columbia.
“Where the Commercial Internet in Alberta started – Sept. 13, 1993″
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rsingh
EMAILED ON OCTOBER 22 BY: K.J. (Ken) Chapman
HI ‚Äì I did a Blog post response to the Telus reps in your October piece. Everyone I talked to in the industry thought it was a great article. Well done.
Here is the link: http://ken-chapman.blogspot.com/2008/10/old-fashioned-telephone-lines-and.html
K.J. (Ken) Chapman
colleen
Great article, Fil,
Following is some additional information that may be of interest.
While it‚Äôs true that the Supernet still has a ways to go before all Albertans are fully connected, a growing number of Alberta communities are starting to tap into the benefits thanks to a unique collaboration between three non-profit organizations and the leadership and support of Advanced Education and Technology.
The iCCAN project (Innovative Communities Connecting and Networking) is a partnership between the Community Learning Network, Literacy Alberta, and Volunteer Alberta. This project is resolving key technical issues and ‚Äòlast mile connectivity‚Äô barriers that exist in providing SuperNet connectivity to rural Alberta.
With funding from Advanced Education and Technology‚Äôs Access to the Future Fund, the iCCAN project is helping these three organizations, their members, boards of directors and volunteers, to ‚Äòplug into‚Äô the Supernet so that videoconferencing can be used to its fullest potential.
Over the next 18 months the iCCAN project will create new opportunities for learning and collaboration by establishing approximately 50 sites as videoconferencing hubs and helping up to 200 additional organizations get desktop videoconferencing up and running. Soon, Albertans from the four corners of the province will be able to participate in all kinds of courses and seminars via videoconference, and the instructor might be in Peace River, Oyen, Edmonton or Calgary.
Non-profit organizations will also realize considerable business efficiencies through videoconferencing. By spending less money, time and energy on travel to attend meetings and seminars, valuable resources can be reallocated to programming and services. For example, volunteer board members in smaller communities would be able to attend ‚Äòdistant‚Äô meetings via videoconferencing and be home for their families that same day.
The SuperNet dream will be realized when citizens in the province‚Äôs smaller communities no longer have to ‚Äòleave home‚Äô to do things that Albertans in larger centres take for granted.
The iCCAN project, with support from the Government of Alberta, will help make that happen.
The visionaries behind this project are:
Jann Beeston, Chair of the Board for the Community Learning Network.
Linda Thorne, Executive Director, Community Learning Network.
Janet Lane, Executive Director, Literacy Alberta.
Karen Lynch, Executive Director, Volunteer Alberta