Community Networks: An idea whose time has come
Phil Carr
Publisher, Canada Connects
ABOUT A YEAR AGO my seventeen-year-old daughter and four of her friends set out to a local video store to get a movie to watch on a Friday evening. She lives with her mother in what is thought to be a peaceful middle class Ottawa neighbourhood.
On the way back they were approached by a threatening group of young males. In what pursued one of her friends was struck in the head using brass knuckles, fell, and was then kicked in the head and stomach. After a drama, which involved police, neighbours, parents and hospitals, but no identified suspects, I decided to dig a little deeper in order to find out what lay behind this disturbing set of events.
What I discovered is that there had been a similar attack that same evening, as well as numerous other recent incidents around Ottawa. Signs of gang activity and the incidence of break-and-enter were both on the rise in the area. I further inquired to see who in our community cared about the problem and what they were prepared to do to make it better. The high school principals claimed that if it didn't happen on school property then they couldn't be involved in either the problem or the solution. Community business people claimed it was not their responsibility and for the most part they are employees reporting to head office anyway. The community residents felt that the police should look after the problem. The police told me that they are overworked and can't be at all places at all times. A year later the attacks are now making the front page of our daily newspaper and there is still no solution in sight.
So what does this have to do with community networks?
It has to do with what happens to the quality of all of our lives, if we delegate the responsibility for shaping our community environment to people who live elsewhere, and to people for whom maintaining our quality of life is "just a job."
In a world where telecommunication services were uniformly available across Canada the centralized control of these services made sense... a phone, was a phone, was a phone.
Today, regional economic success depends critically on the quality and the cost of our high-speed communication infrastructure, and our telco's are telling us that we are decades away from achieving communication infrastructure equity across Canada. Many believe that the time has come to bring control of this issue back into the hands of the people it affects most.
Community Based Networks
Community Based Networks (CBNs) represent an opportunity for shared investment, where all stakeholders can invest in infrastructure, which will add value to the local economy, create employment, increase the tax base, reduce social service costs, as well as increase property values. Based solely on the return on investment (ROI) to the network owner, rural networks represent either a marginal or a bad investment. When you factor in the interests of the local taxpayers and tax collectors of all sorts, investment in rural networks begin to make much more economic sense.
What is holding us back is acceptance on the part of governments, commercial suppliers and Canadians in general that this is the only way we will be able to justify the investment required to maintain the economic viability of rural Canada and rural Canadians.
Dozens of CBN'' s exist across Canada. Many are organizations established to facilitate and encourage private sector investment in rural communication infrastructure. Others have included the acquisition of publicly owned infrastructure. Three examples of CBNs of the second type include KNET; South Dundas; and Alberta SuperNet.
Each of these networks involve publicly owned infrastructure, and is based on a unique concept which provides evidence of the value of CBN'' s and lessons for those who wish to follow.
South Dundas Fibre Network
The South Dundas Fibre Network was established in 2001 by the Municipality of South Dundas in order to serve businesses in the rural Ontario towns of Morrisburg and Iroquois. At an original cost to the town of about $500,000 the network was both a success and a failure.
On the success side this rural municipality had shed six hundred (600) jobs in the ten years prior to the installation of the network. Seven hundred (700) new jobs were created during the 18 months following the network installation. This clear demonstration of how investment in bandwidth correlates with growth in business activity and employment was documented by a study carried out by Strategic Network Group Inc. and paid for by the UK government. This case study continues to be used extensively throughout the UK to justify public investment in broadband.
On the other side of the equation, the network has been seen by some members of the South Dundas community as a subsidy to business, particularly since the publicly owned network has been run with an operational deficit of about $100,000 per year since completion. Public opinion resulted in the election of a municipal council, which has taken steps to privatize the network while at the same time Bell Canada is now delivering DSL service within the same communities. The future of this pioneering CBN appears uncertain, but the economic benefits it delivered have been and will remain long lasting.
Alberta SuperNet
Alberta SuperNet is a unique provincial concept, which has attempted to balance the public-sector/private-sector challenge by creating one provincial network to be managed by Axia SuperNet Ltd. Alberta SuperNet will provide a fibre connection to every hospital, school, library and municipal office in the province once the network goes live in April 2005. The base network (27 cities), which are of commercial interest, will be owned and operated by Bell Canada. The province will own the remaining extended area network in rural Alberta.
The magic of the Alberta SuperNet is that the network will provide open access to resalable bandwidth to third party ISP''s at every end point, regardless of whether the particular part of network is publicly or privately owned. The original public investment in the network was $193M. The project has had its share of delays and disagreements between the province and its partners, but in the end the success of the network goes beyond the effect of any immediate delays.
What the network has done for the provincial government is to show a path forward to the day when every community in the province will have broadband service and nearly every citizen will have high-speed access. With this inevitability in view the Alberta government is now reinventing how it plans to deliver all of its services using the efficiencies offered by connectivity. The Alberta Electronic Health Record initiative alone represents a revolution in the province''s ability to increase the quality and reduce the cost of health care delivery throughout the province. Similar plans to revamp other services for delivery over broadband are taking place throughout the provincial government.
KNET
KNET is the not for profit First Nations organization responsible for providing the support services required to deliver health care and education services to fly in communities throughout Northern Ontario. The core KNET strategy is to find or invent means to deliver these services over broadband wherever possible.
Parts of the physical network are fibre based within the southern areas, turning to wireless as you travel north from Sioux Lookout and finally in the most northern reaches of the province bandwidth is delivered entirely over satellite.
Faced with the large financial and social costs associated with flying community members out to receive both health care and secondary school education, broadband now offers a solution for these communities to become more self-sufficient. Services previously delivered totally from the outside are now being delivered from within. This in turn is creating employment and skill development opportunities for community members. As important as reducing travel cost, is the ability to have family support throughout the process of health care and education delivery. This makes the educational and health care process more effective as it strengthens family and community bonds.
Keewaytinook Okimakanak community members Learn about TeleHealth.
The cost of delivering bandwidth into Northern Ontario is currently offset by savings in the reduction in the air travel required to bring community members out for education and health care services. It is more than offset if you factor in the human benefits obtained in keeping families and people whole, while increasing the rate of success in achieving secondary school educations and helping people become more engaged socially and economically with the world outside of their village.
Lessons Learned
Of all the network success stories in Canada I would choose KNET as being the most exemplary of what is possible. The extreme shift that has taken place over five years is unmistakeable. Communities without a telephone have been transformed into communities where videoconferencing is commonplace, web design and personal web home pages are the norm and new ways to deliver education are being invented and demonstrated everyday.
KNET has succeeded in an important way, where other community networks have succeeded less well. They have identified from the beginning that the value of the network could not be enumerated in terms of revenues generated in exchange for dollars invested. Instead success is measured in terms of human transformation. How many more first nation students now graduate from high school than did previously. How much more family support is now available for people who need medical treatment. How much healthier and more productive are people who feel capable of filling their own needs and teaching their own children?
If KNET becomes the seed that transforms the First Nations peoples and communities into healthy and productive partners in Canadian society, the investment in physical infrastructure will seem inconsequential in comparison.
Networks like Alberta SuperNet and the South Dundas were motivated at their core by the same types of social concerns as KNET. However South Dundas has been judged in accordance with its ability to become financially self-sustaining. Alberta has under written the cost of the extended portion of the provincial network yet last mile providers are still expected to become commercially self-sustaining and pay commercial rates for Alberta SuperNet bandwidth.
In a society where we readily invest in education, research, roads, water and sewer, and public health care in the knowledge that these are the fundamental costs of doing business in a first world economy, we somehow miss the point that being connected as a country and as a society has a trans-formative power which makes people, businesses and communities more successful and more a part of the world.
For myself personally, connectivity provides a chance for Canadian''s to come together and finally define for themselves and for the world, what it really means to be Canadian and why ours are the values that a world rife with pollution, anger and war needs to adopt, if we hope eventually to make peace with our planet and with each other.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Phil Carr holds an Hons B.Sc. in co-op Applied Physics from the University of Waterloo Ontario. He founded and grew Atlantis Scientific Inc., a successful contract R&D firm that he sold in 1995. Since then he has been attempting to help solve some of the marketing and communication challenges facing technology innovators in Canada. He launched Canada Connects Magazine in 2003 as means to bring technology innovators and technology users, closer together.