Community ownership key to connectivity: Winnipeg Municipality Region

Winnipeg Municipality Region executive director Colleen Sklar says the organisation would have taken community ownership of rural broadband earlier if it had its time over again, telling Canada’s Rural and Regional Broadband Conference that private-public partnerships are key to achieving universal connectivity as soon as possible. Speaking as part of a session on rural community broadband models, Sklar said a lack of coordination around broadband deployment had “really put us behind” and said internet service providers building service over the top of other services in particular had slowed progress. “If we could actually coordinate and use our resources in the best way possible I believe everyone could be served and that’s really where we need to go to better serve communities into the future,” Sklar said. Thirteen members of the WMR created the cooperatively owned economic development corporation JohnQ Public Inc. in 2018, and formed partnerships with private internet service providers to increase the access to fibre broadband in the region, with the intention of stopping the “patchwork” approach to the region, Sklar said. “It’s really a model of collaboration, and what it says really is we can’t go one community at a time, we have to look at the entire region and figure out how do we service everybody,” she said. “How do we make sure our businesses and industries and the farms have the service they need to drive the economy and we don’t start to turn our main streets into ghost towns across Manitoba.” Eastern Ontario Regional Network communications director Lisa Severson told the panel that the organization had begun to pursue build outs that would secure service speeds of 1 Gpbs following a meeting with a local member of parliament, rather than securing service at the CRTC’s universal service objectives of 50 Mpbs download and 10 Mbps upload, only to have to seek further funding in the future. “That’s what we’re now pursuing, trying to get 95 per cent of the region to get that wired connection so people don’t have to sell their homes and move away because they can’t get the connection they need,” Severson said. EORN’s 2018 analysis showed that having 95 per cent of its region having access to speeds at the standard would cost $500-750 million, while speeds of up to 1 Gpbs would cost $1.2 to 1.6 billion. Currently 63 per cent of the region has access to 50/10 speeds, but just 47 per cent of rural areas do, Severson told the panel. The government has set its target date for universal connectivity, where every Canadian has access to speeds at 50/10, at 2030. Regional economic development minister Maryam Monsef told the conference yesterday that the government’s $1.7 billion Universal Broadband Fund would open applications in coming days.

Community ownership key to connectivity: Winnipeg Municipality Region

Brief | June 9, 2020

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Community ownership key to connectivity: Winnipeg Municipality Region

Brief | June 9, 2020

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