Bringing broadband to rural British Columbia

A not-for-profit organization dedicated to bringing broadband to British Columbia’s Kootenay region hopes this year will see the same kind of progress that 2005 did. After planning since 2001 for an open network bringing high-speed access to a 88,000 square-kilometre area of the BC interior, the Columbia Mountain Open Network (CMON), a seven-person broadband network operator headquartered in Castlegar BC, got underway in earnest last year. "We laid our first fibre January 2005, so the first actual fibre deployment just started then, says Dan McCarthy, CMON’s chief executive. "In the last year we’ve really taken the step from conceptual to maintenance, operations, building, everything that’s involved with these networks." Projects currently underway include build-outs for the Ktunaxa Nation Council and Regional District of East Kootenay. "We’ve completed detailed engineering, the engineering is now in review with Industry Canada at the moment, and the Regional District project is moving forward," he says. "We should start to order equipment for construction for that project within the next couple of weeks, and start building within a month or so hopefully. The project itself runs just under 200 kilometres of fibre optic deployment, it has two fibre-to-the-home locations, and I believe 24 wireless towers." Last year also saw two relatively large towns in the BC interior join the network: Trail, with a population of approximately 7,500, and Sparwood, with approximately 3,800 residents. In the latter case, says McCarthy, "we’re putting in a four-and-a-half kilometre underground fibre optic backbone that will provide fibre-to-the-business," adding the backbone may form the nexus of a fibre-to-the-home initiative in the future as well. Trail already has some CMON-built network capacity thanks to the group’s first build-out project, referred to as School District 20 for the administrative region it falls into, which was completed in 2004. "Trail…took advantage of the co-build opportunity while we were building that fibre and they put in some of their own fibre for future networks," McCarthy explains. "It was piggy-backing on that project that Trail has decided to move forward and put in their own POP site, and use some of the fibre they have existing from the co-build on the School District 20 project to initiate their broadband project ." The Kootenay region and the Columbia Basin are possibly a network engineer’s worst nightmare: thousands of square kilometers of forest and craggy mountains to foil line-of-sight wireless, coupled with belts of hard rock that make burying fibre a near-impossible task. Given the tough geography, CMON has tried nearly every route imaginable to connect the communities therein. "We have attempted to enter into partnerships with Telus, to use their copper last-miles to bring DSL-type services – that didn’t work for several reasons," McCarthy says. "There’s always options for hybrid fibre-coax if you partner with cable TV companies. Even broadband over powerline is…an option." And while CMON does use every tool at its disposal, the bulk of the deployment to date has been in fibre and wireless. "When available we use the existing infrastructure, the poles or towers, when they’re in place," McCarthy says. "If you’re putting something on poles, at this point in time it makes more sense that it’s fibre you’re putting up as opposed to building a copper system from scratch, because the cost is actually in the construction, not in the material." At one time heavily reliant on government funding – such as that available through the federal government’s Broadband for Rural and Northern Development program and regional initiatives like the Columbia Basin Trust – CMON is now operating through a fee-for-service model, and also earns a $4 per-capita membership fee that each municipality pays to become a member in the network. "Sometimes it means we work with communities to build those networks, sometimes we bring attention to those communities and people like Telus or Shaw come in and have those networks built before we get there. But the goal is to have these services available in rural areas." CMON isn’t in the business of service provision on the network, however. "CMON is not in the market to compete with them for any services," McCarthy states. "They’re our members, so we work with them to bring services on their network." Using software and equipment from a Swedish firm, PacketFront AB, users can self-provision by accessing their broadband connection’s splash page and then choosing from a menu of services that includes not just high-speed Internet access but also voice over IP, online gaming, IP-enabled home security, video-on-demand services, and more. The businesses selling those services pay a premium to the network operator – either CMON or municipalities such as Trail – for access, allowing them to recoup build-out costs. Future plans include building redundant backhaul out of the region; CMON currently buys backhaul from third parties. For that, McCarthy says, there are two options: go east through the town of Sparwood and access the Alberta SuperNet in the neighboring province, or; go through the town of Nelway on the border with Washington state, and link up to a community network down there. However, he adds, "in order to get there we have to have many community members, we have to have successful networks in place in order to have the need for that kind of backhaul. We’re still very grass-roots.".

Bringing broadband to rural British Columbia

News | January 18, 2006

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