Indigenous communities will be left behind without funding overhaul: ISP

As the question of how to connect rural communities across Canada to increasingly essential high-speed broadband internet continues to occupy the minds of policy makers and telecom companies, one Indigenous-owned internet service provider says there needs to be a separate stream of funding for companies devoted to indigenous communities. Without it, Indigenous communities will get left behind, Western James Bay Telecom Network (WJBTN) Sally Braun told Canada’s Rural and Remote Broadband Conference. "If the objective of the universal basic service was to lift large portions of the population out of poverty, this objective will happen a lot faster when indigenous ISPs are supported in a manner that recognizes their uniqueness," Braun said during a Monday afternoon panel on First Nations broadband connectivity. "This means changing the guidelines which restrict our ability to participate in funding that is available." In a phone interview with the Wire Report following the conference, Braun said that the current structure of government funding for broadband services applies the market logic of profits and losses to communities that can't reasonably produce a return on investment for large telecoms. Not-for-profits like hers, she said, have to compete for funding with companies with institutional structures and capacity to file complicated and intricate applications. Western James Bay Telecom provides internet access to Attawapiskat, Kashechewan, and Fort Albany -- all First Nations communities in northeastern Ontario. "Not for profits need access to a separate funding – one where we are not required to compete with multi-million corporations which have access to in house resources and expertise that we do not," she wrote in a follow-up email to the Wire Report. At the same conference, Regional Economic Development Minister Maryam Monsef said the $1.7 billion Universal Broadband Fund would open for applications in the "coming days." In detailing the four-year process in getting funding for a fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) project in those communities, Braun described what she called a "log jam" of regulatory red tape. WJBTN’s bank, RBC, wanted to see approvals from Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, which in turn wanted to see approvals from the North Ontario Heritage Fund Corporation. "NOHFC wanted to see approvals from the bank, so we were in a real chicken and egg situation," Braun said. She said she ended up having to go to Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne herself, who sent Braun to the Minister of Northern Development and Mines, which eventually broke the impasse, netting WJBTN about $4.2 million from a combination of funding from NOHFC, ISED, RBC, and the Nord-Aski Community Futures Development Fund. The process showed, Braun said in an interview, that companies like hers lack the institutional capacity needed to apply for the type of funding on offer from the government. "If I get 100 dollars out of this, I have to spend 40 on hiring somebody that can sort of help me navigate through the application morass," she said. The programs, she said, are "not tapping into the entrepreneurial potential of the Indigenous population." What's more, Braun said, the private sector does not seem interested in expanding service to Indigenous communities. "For decades, the for-profit telecom companies have not invested in remote communities as much as we think they should, because the return on investment is not fast enough to warrant it," Braun said Asked what the experience of the FTTH project taught her, Braun said the funding process had become more complicated over the years. The process, Braun said, was relatively simple when rural broadband funding was under the roof of the Federal Economic Development Initiative for Northern Ontario, known as FedNor. "The FedNor funding guidelines were very easy to understand," Braun said. "It's almost like the ISED guidelines were developed by a statistician," she said, adding that the price of broadband went up some 50 per cent from when she lodged the application for their FTTH project in 2014 and the project's launch in 2019. The Ontario Energy Board's pole attachment fee, Braun said, also almost doubled: from $22.35 per year per pole, to now over $43 per pole. The difficulty, Braun said, is not because of a lack of initiative on the part of her company, which she said worked hard to pay back the loan it received from RBC. "I wanted to make sure, because we're planning this next project, I sort of wanted to prove to the RBC and the Nord-Aski Community Futures Fund that we could do it," she said. "Here's a 100 per cent Indigenous owned ISP with a good business plan, with assets, but we still had to go through I don't know how many rounds of evaluation," she said. Part of the answer, she said, -- in addition to a set-aside for Indigenous ISPs -- is that those in charge of administering funding should visit the communities in question. "Whoever is developing these guidelines, they need to visit the communities. They need to actually go there," she said. "I had to wait for four months for the Connect to Innovate project. According to them Attawapiskat didn't exist," she said. "There was no hexagon there," she added, referring to the hexagon-shaped mapping, which divides the country into 25 square-kilometer sections. The method has been criticized for not being specific enough to accurately capture all areas lacking high-speed broadband infrastructure, including by the auditor general in a fall 2018 report. The hexagon mapping model will not be used in the UBF. The end-result of the taxing effort to navigate funding processes is that WJBTN is very dedicated, Braun says. "You have to have a lot of tenacity to carry out and finally get the project to the point where you can start working,” Braun said. -- With reporting by Michael Lee-Murphy at mleemurphy@thewirereport.ca and editing by Adam Langenberg at alangenberg@thewirereport.ca

Indigenous communities will be left behind without funding overhaul: ISP

News | 06/11/2020 5:07 pm EDT

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