Rural broadband ‘public policy priority’ for CRTC, Scott says

As the CRTC announced the first recipients of its $750-million rural broadband fund Wednesday, chairman Ian Scott said in an interview that while the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to delays in the funding process, it also made it more “imperative” to make rural broadband a priority. Five projects will receive a total of $72 million to improve connectivity in northern Manitoba, the Yukon and the Northwest Territories, which will improve access to service for more than 10,000 households. The CRTC deferred consideration of proposals for Nunavut to the second phase of the fund. Four projects from BCE Inc.’s Northwestel in the Yukon and the Northwest Territories will provide speeds meeting the CRTC’s basic service objective — the 50 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload with unlimited data minimum it says all Canadians should be able to access — to about a quarter of households in those two territories. The projects will include the installation of 316 km of new fibre links. But the projects in northern Manitoba, which will be rolled out by Broadband Communications North, will only provide satellite broadband with speeds of 10 Mbps upload and 1 Mbps download. The CRTC said in the release the project is “an interim step, as Broadband Communications North has plans to offer improved services in the future.” In the interview, Scott said he approved the project because ““it’s three times faster than what they have today, and if we wait for someone to come with a proposal for 50/10, maybe they have to wait five years. Does that make sense?” “if you have none, or if you have 3 Mbps as was the case in northern Manitoba and they’re going to 10 Mbps, then that’s a significant improvement. And so is the availability of an unlimited service. That’s a big factor in remote areas,” Scott said. Asked whether accepting projects with lower speeds muddies the waters or undermines the CRTC’s basic service objective, Scott said it does not because the CRTC has said it would consider lower speeds if “there was a path to 50.” “Are we saying 25 is good enough? No. That’s not what we’re doing,” he said. The first round of applications for the fund opened more than a year ago, with application closing in October. Asked whether the process of choosing and announcing the successful applicants was delayed, including due to the COVID-19 pandemic beginning in March, Scott said: “Would I have expected it to be a little sooner than now? A little, yes, and I don’t like to point everything to COVID, but ... that had a certain impact.” More significantly, he said this is the CRTC’s first time administering this program. “This is the first time we’re going through this,” meaning the CRTC had to figure out everything from the application process to maps that may be inaccurate. There were also some difficult decisions for commissioners to make. “This is hard stuff. They’re all valid projects. In one way or another, they all are attempting to provide a higher grade of service to Canadians, and you have to say yes to some and no to others,” he said. “It’s not easy.” Scott said he doesn’t expect it to take as long to announce the recipients of the second phase of funding as it was the first time around, but the second phase also has its own challenges. “It won’t take quite as long but there are 600 applications asking for $1.5 billion,” he said. The CRTC twice delayed the fund’s application deadline for the second phase of the program due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Construction for the projects announced Wednesday will begin in the spring of 2021, and Scott noted there is a three-year window for projects to be completed, though when the CRTC expects them to be completed depends on the projects. When the CRTC opened the fund for applications, Scott said the regulator chose to initially target areas in the Northwest Territories, Nunavut and Yukon, or satellite-dependent communities in any area of Canada, because those were the most in need of improvement, with not a single one meeting the CRTC’s basic service objective. That situation remains the same a year later, though Scott noted that there have been improvements to some services in Nunavut. “But it didn’t change the overall view” of why it’s necessary to address connectivity in the North, he said. Overall, in 2018, 85.7 per cent of Canadians had access to 50 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload. Nearly all — 97.7 per cent — of urban dwellers had access to those speeds, but only 40.8 per cent of rural households did. The situation is even worse in First Nations reserves, where less than a third, 31.3 per cent, have access to those speeds, according to the CRTC’s latest data. Scott said the CRTC still expects 90 per cent of Canadians to have access to speeds meeting the basic service objective by the end of 2021. “I think we’ll get there, in particular given… other federal programs, provincial, territorial. There’s a lot of attention and effort being placed on broadband for obviously good reasons.” There are also a lot of variables affecting rollouts, he noted. “When be available will have a big impact on places like the North. Will there be fibre builds into the Arctic?” he said. Even something as basic as currency exchange rates with the U.S. will impact the buying of equipment, Scott noted. Despite those factors, there are things that can be done to accelerate rollouts, he said. “What do you need? You need the technology, and generally speaking, we know what those are. You need committed service providers and I think we have that, certainly evidenced by almost 600 proposals for just our fund,” Scott explained. “So that leaves money, and it would appear increasingly the money is there… I think it’s clear and it’s been made all the more imperative because of COVID that this a public policy priority. It certainly is for the commission. I don’t speak for the government of Canada, or other governments, but it certainly is for us and I think it is for every level of government. That’s the starting point to getting things to happen faster.” But there have been delays to the government’s $1 billion Universal Broadband Fund, which Innovation, Science and Economic Development initially planned to launch in the spring. It still hasn’t launched, despite Rural Economic Development Minister Maryam Monsef saying in late April the government would “accelerate” rural broadband initiatives in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and then promising in early June the UBF would open for applications within “days.” Scott declined to comment on those delays. While the CRTC and the federal government have cooperated on their respective funds on aspects like mapping and making sure resources aren’t wasted, he said, “we’re independent from them and they’re independent from us. I don’t have any view onto how long it will take or if it’s too long. I’m happy to see the statements coming from government that this is a priority.” Also on Wednesday, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) released new measurements, showing that in July, the median download speeds in rural areas were 5.62 Mbps, ten times slower than the 51.54 Mbps in urban Canada. Rural speeds were about on par with the 5.42 Mbps median in rural Canada CIRA measured in March, before they dipped to 3.78 Mbps in April. In comparison, urban speeds nearly doubled from a median of 26.35 Mbps in March, and improved further from the 44.09 Mbps measured in April. CIRA said that data was based on 130,794 urban tests and 56,982 rural tests conducted between May 2019 and July 2020. — With reporting by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca and editing by Adam Langenberg at alangenberg@thewirereport.ca

Rural broadband ‘public policy priority’ for CRTC, Scott says

News | August 12, 2020

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Rural broadband ‘public policy priority’ for CRTC, Scott says

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