Politicians and business leaders highlighted the issue during the Recognizing Rural Communities discussion, led by former MP Candice Bergen. The event featured two panels.

Bergen said federal politicians must better understand that Canada has a diversity of rural communities and different approaches are needed to meet their specific needs.

“Many of those challenges can only be addressed through a really focused effort, sector by sector.”

Accessible broadband internet and the need for reliable web connectivity in rural areas was a primary focus.

Gudie Hutchings, minister of rural economic development, spoke about her experience with this issue in the largely rural riding of Long Range Mountains in western Newfoundland.

“We heard from rural Canadians that broadband internet was the equalizer for economic development and for life,” she said.

She said broadband can help long-distance learning, career support and medical care and “it’s given families peace of mind.”

Dan Mazier, a Manitoboa MP and shadow minister of rural economic development, called rural Canada “the lifeline that fuels our country’s growth and prosperity,” but also acknowledged the gap in internet access that could prevent rural Canada from reaching its full potential.

“That means unlocking our abundant natural resources, including our energy and agriculture, not only for ourselves, but for the rest of the world. However, to fully harness this potential, we must address a pressing need, the need for high-speed internet and cellular connectivity.”

The first panel, Putting Rural Canada on the National Agenda, featured Liberal MP Francis Drouin, Conservative MP Lianne Rood and NDP MP Taylor Bachrach.

Drouin said a major concern in his Ontario riding of Glengarry-Prescott-Russell is the “exodus” of youth to Ottawa and Montreal. “Remote working, that’s a huge opportunity for us now, but we need access to internet.”

Bachrach, meanwhile, noted the challenge in recruiting health-care professionals to rural areas.

“We’re seeing emergency rooms put on diversion, people having to travel to other communities to access emergency services because there aren’t enough doctors. We need to ask ourselves: how do we create vibrant and sustainable communities that doctors and nurses want to move to?”

Rood said rural Canadians do not have enough options for fibre-optic internet.

Connecting “the last mile” to networks is an often noted challenge, she said, while other residents complain of “simply not having access even to basic cell phone service in some areas where, you know, farmers are very reliant on technology now, more than most people realize.

“Not having access to cell phone service, to the internet, availability to run the programs in their tractors, when you’re field mapping or you’re trying to test different places in your soil, it makes it very difficult.”

Investment and growth

The second panel, Business and Investment in Rural Canada, included Forest Products Association of Canada CEO Derek Nighbor, Canadian Telecoms Association CEO and former P.E.I. premier Robert Ghiz and Cathy Jo Noble of the National Cattle Feeders’ Association.

Ghiz said connectivity is “one of the themes to the solution.”

“We want to be able to connect more people. The more customers you have, the better off you do.”

But cost is a problem. Ghiz said most Canadians have access to broadband internet but the disparity grows when looking at rural communities.

“If you look at rural Canada today, rural Canada is only 67 per cent connected to home internet. That’s a lot of connectivity that needs to take place.”

The post Push continues for rural connectivity at Ottawa event appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

Now it’s almost “non-existent.”

“We sigh a lot,” said Benoit, who farms with husband Mike near High Prairie. “Even when there’s not a pandemic, we have internet issues. But with the isolation and social distancing protocols we’re supposed to be following, it has got a lot worse.”

Because of COVID-19, Canadians are working, schooling and socializing online to an unprecedented degree — which works if you have high-speed internet. But that’s not the case for most rural residents.

“I compare it to a water hose that’s an inch thick — the more holes you put in it, the lower the pressure gets,” said Al Kemmere, president of the Rural Municipalities of Alberta.

“That’s what we’re experiencing right now. The internet delivery model is just not strong enough to take the amount of draw that’s on it.”

As a result, rural Albertans are experiencing issues not seen since the days of dial-up — videos that buffer, dropped connections, and in some cases, no connection at all.

“This is our new system of communication,” said Kemmere. “We shouldn’t have to live with a service that is so second class compared to what other people in our province have.”

On the Benoits’ farm, the couple has been relying on the internet to take care of their farm business ahead of seeding — or at least they’ve been trying to.

“We try to do things electronically, and we can’t because it’s not working,” said Benoit.

She and her husband have been trying to connect for things such as banking, filling out online funding applications, and reviewing grain contracts, with limited success.

“It’s been a lot more tedious. When I go to upload files, I basically have to set it up and go do something else while I wait for it to load back up again,” she said.

“That definitely slows down business.”

Not a luxury

The pandemic has underscored the importance of reliable high-speed internet — and amplified long-standing frustrations with the inadequacy of the systems serving rural areas.

“This has taught us how desperately badly we need improved performance — bandwidth and speed of connectivity — in rural Alberta,” said Jason Bradley, director of smart ag at Olds College.

“There’s a whole infrastructure requirement for rural connectivity in Canada.”

High-speed internet is no longer a luxury, it’s a necessity, he said.

“Rural connectivity is an essential service,” said Bradley. “For Canada to be able to meet the essential need for food, as has been highlighted by this pandemic, we need to be able to run our businesses as efficiently and effectively as possible to make sure we’re supplying food to the supply chain.

“These products that we’re buying in the stores have to start on the farm. And if the farm isn’t provided with the same high-speed connectivity infrastructure that the rest of the industry is provided, we will be at risk.”

Slow speed is not just a pressing issue today, it’s a barrier for farmers trying to incorporate a wave of new technology that experts say is the future of agriculture.

Olds College’s Smart Farm has both rural narrowband connectivity and a wireless mesh network that provides Wi-Fi to the entire farm to facilitate these technologies.

“High-speed connectivity is fairly important when it comes to some of these technologies,” said Bradley. “All the different tools and devices and innovations that require high speed are going to have to have that to allow our producers to be highly competitive and highly profitable.”

The Benoits have explored digital farm management options such as Farmers Edge, one of several precision ag companies whose services are based on things such as collecting data in real time from farm equipment and combining it with satellite imagery, weather info and other data to produce sophisticated management tools for things such as variable-rate seeding and input applications.

But given their limited internet capability, the Benoits can’t justify the investment.

“We’ve decided we’re going to hold off on that until we have better internet or cell service,” she said. “If we’re out in the field somewhere, there’s lots of stuff we won’t be able to use if we can’t connect to the internet.”

‘Stupid internet’

Another company in this space is AGvisorPRO, which offers a new app that promises to “instantly connect” farmers with agricultural advisers right in the field.

“The degree we’re able to help farmers or advisers remotely is tied to the expectation that AGvisorPRO would be able to reach them in the field,” said company founder Robert Saik.

“If they can’t get a signal in the field, we can’t make this thing work.”

While the system has been developed to run on “relatively thin broadband,” the ability to use a key feature of the app — photo and video diagnostics — suffers without strong internet or cellular coverage.

“You can’t have a smart farm with a stupid internet connection,” said Saik. “We can’t have adequate development and adequate integration of smart technology with a stupid connection. It just doesn’t work.”

Farmers run the risk of being left behind by inadequate internet service — and that makes no sense, either, he said.

“Can you imagine being in Calgary and running a $10-million business without the internet? Of course not. It’s ridiculous,” said Saik.

“And yet there are farms all over the place running $10-million businesses without adequate broadband. It’s preposterous.”

And that gap between urban and rural is about to get a lot larger.

The current internet standard is 4G (fourth generation) but the technology is about to take a big jump forward with 5G. It not only offers much faster speeds (up to, in theory, 100 times faster) and much more bandwidth, but also addresses an even bigger issue — latency.

Latency is the lag time between devices and servers. Having a superfast connection between the two is key. For example, making self-driving equipment work properly depends on a powerful remote computer analyzing what’s going on so it can instantaneously instruct the vehicle how to respond to what’s happening at the moment.

“5G will be something totally new in terms of allowing the speed of information to travel really rapidly,” said Rob Ghiz, president and CEO of the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association.

Bridging the divide

But it doesn’t come cheap.

“For a country of our size with our small population base, it’s a very expensive endeavour,” said Ghiz. “Our estimate is that 5G in Canada will cost approximately $26 billion over the next five to seven years.”

Those economics are a challenge when you’re talking about urban centres. The business case for rural internet has always been a tough sell.

The federal government regulates the telecommunications industry, and while politicians have long promised to address the ‘digital divide’ between urban and rural Canada, progress has been slow because internet service providers can’t justify very big investments for a very small customer base.

“For us, it’s really about having a regulatory environment that encourages investment by facilities-based carriers,” said Ghiz. “Hopefully governments will look to provide a more favourable environment and encourage the providers in Canada to invest more. But like anything, the regulatory framework needs to be in place for that.”

Kemmere agrees that better government regulations are needed — but for the service providers themselves.

“They’re not going to do what needs to be done to provide connectivity in the rural environment if they’re not legislated to do so,” he said. “We need to get to a point where, if the companies are going to provide a level of service within the higher-populated areas, they also need to provide a relatively similar service in rural areas.”

For Saik, it comes down to a combination of better public policy and infrastructure development — and that will depend on both private and public investment.

“Where does the investment come from for roads? Where does the investment come from for bridges? To me, this is foundational,” he said, adding some countries have declared access to the internet as a basic human right.

“I’m hopeful that we in Canada are going to continue to lead (as smart ag developers), but we need the infrastructure, and we need the investment.”

For farmers like the Benoits, the promise of reliable high-speed internet hits much closer to home — it could make or break their business.

“We’re at a point where we need the internet to do our day-to-day business,” said Benoit.

“If I have to pay three times as much a month to have the same internet that my competitor in the States has, that’s a huge hit to our operation.”

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“I can see downtown Calgary from my window right now, and I feel like I’m in the sticks,” said Shelagh Blatz, who lives near Priddis.

“I’m so close to Calgary, but I might as well be five hours north of Valleyview.”

With Blatz, her husband, and their four children social distancing at home, their “smart hub” just can’t keep up with the increased demand.

“It’s very overloaded,” said Blatz. “The more people who get it in the neighbourhood, the slower it gets. So with everyone in the neighbourhood home, it’s always dropping or it’s incredibly slow.”

So slow that Blatz’s husband has had to block all of the other devices in the house from accessing the internet in order to download a single email from work.

“We’ll all take turns doing our work — we have to kind of ration it out,” Blatz said April 9. “It’s such a necessity, from business to work to school.”

The night before, she took part in a 4-H meeting via the Zoom video-conferencing app, praying the whole time that the connection would hold.

“We’ve been doing a lot of those with 4-H over the last week, and I would say 80 per cent of the people have to turn off their video so it’s not lagging,” she said.

“It’s for sure a widespread issue. It’s so bogged down with everyone at home.”

It’s the same story in Sarah Hissett’s home near Wainwright.

“I have the Telus internet hub, which is trying at the best of times, let alone when you have everyone working from home and not allowed to go out,” said Hissett. “But we have found now, during this lockdown, that peak times — like when everyone is home in the evening Netflixing — are a tough time for internet.”

Like the Blatz family, Hissett and her husband are juggling work, volunteer duties, and homeschool with this slow internet — and rationing it to make it work.

“I’m lucky that I have a kindergartener and a fourth grader,” said Hissett. “The kindergarten isn’t too intense with internet use, but when the fourth grader has her conferences, we make sure that no one else is doing anything on the internet.”

But the internet has also become a lifeline to friends and family for the Hissetts during this period of social distancing, and the slow speeds have been a barrier to that as well.

“Last Tuesday, when Telus had its internet outage, it was right when (my daughter) was supposed to be doing her weekly conference call with all of her friends, so she missed out on the social aspect for the week just because the internet wasn’t working,” said Hissett.

Last weekend, the couple hosted a virtual games night over Zoom — or at least they tried to.

“The entire internet in the house crashed,” she said. “We both hot-spotted off of our phones in order to play. We decided we weren’t even going to touch the house internet because it’s so unstable.”

Hissett also sits on the local health foundation board, and their last monthly meeting was held over Zoom, with mixed results.

“It’s always scary when people are freezing and you’re missing stuff, and then you get the warning — ‘Your internet connection is unstable,’” she said.

“A lot of our board members are rural. There’s only a couple who live in town. One woman, her internet booted her, and she couldn’t get back in through the internet. She had to call in.”

The pandemic has underscored just how important reliable high-speed internet is in today’s world, she said.

“Internet has become so vital in our day to day, and rural Alberta is getting the bum rush,” said Hissett.

“We’re only 15 minutes outside of town. I can’t imagine how it is for people who are actually rural.”

The post Rationing internet a pandemic side-effect appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

But in rural Alberta, it’s an all-too-common problem.

“The connection gets weaker and weaker the further you get away from the main corridor,” said Al Kemmere, president of Rural Municipalities of Alberta.

“The more remote you get, the bigger the challenge is.”

And it doesn’t seem to be going away any time soon.

In 2016, the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) launched a new funding program that would inject $750 million over five years to build or upgrade broadband internet service to underserved Canadians — namely, those living in rural areas.

The standard was set at 50 megabytes per second in download speeds and 10 Mbps in upload speeds — which would have brought underserved, rural areas more in line with urban centres.

But in a September announcement outlining details of its Broadband Fund (which will start accepting applications in 2019), the CRTC quietly adjusted its target speeds. It will now accept projects offering 25 Mbps for downloads and five Mbps for uploads — half of the original targets from two years ago.

“The commission considers that a minimum speed eligibility criterion of 25 Mbps download and five Mbps upload would be a meaningful and a significant first step towards meeting the universal service objective,” the CRTC said in a telecom regulatory policy released Sept. 27.

Two-class system

Kemmere disagrees.

“We were very disappointed to hear that they would set a lower threshold,” he said. “Two years ago when they made their initial call on this, the targets were only just reaching adequacy then. Now to roll it back to half of that capacity is putting us even further behind.”

That’s backed up by one of CRTC’s own reports, a 2017 study that found 84 per cent of Canadian households currently have access to 50 Mbps download speeds and 10 Mbps upload speeds. But the digital divide is made plain when looking at the breakdown between rural and urban areas — only 39 per cent of rural households have access to that level of service, compared to a whopping 96 per cent of urban households.

“It creates almost a two-class system,” said Kemmere. “The internet is where our world is. It’s where our business is. It’s where all of us have a connection point to be part of society.

“It’s a rapidly changing world, and to roll it back is just setting us on a further skid as far as our standards go.”

It’s particularly troubling for the agriculture industry, he added.

Things like cloud-based software, equipment manuals, and other online resources typically require higher-speed internet connections, and that isn’t the reality on a lot of Alberta farms.

“If farmers don’t have that connectivity, they’re going to have to find other ways to connect with resources to get the information they need,” he said.

“Agriculture is advancing so fast that if we don’t have the right connectivity, we’re going to be left behind.”

Legislating higher speeds

Kemmere understands the rationale behind the decision to lower the thresholds — the CRTC wants to make the program (and subsequent system upgrades) more appealing to service providers.

Providing internet to rural and remote locations is expensive, and these companies need to be incentivized to invest in these areas (or so the logic goes).

But the federal government needs a little stick to go along with the carrot, Kemmere said.

“They need to deal with this not only from a funding point of view, but also from a legislative point of view,” he said. “The service providers that are providing services in the more populated areas need to be mandated to provide a certain level of service in the rural areas that will make it more equivalent.

“And I believe that needs to be legislated in.”

Service providers that offer high-speed internet of 100 Mbps in an urban centre — “which is becoming more and more common all the time”— should be required to provide at least 75 per cent of those speeds in rural areas as well, he said.

“It’s probably not practical to go to the one-to-one service levels at this point, but they need to at least bring that level of service up,” said Kemmere.

“There appears to be some new technologies coming, and I believe the technology will come if it’s being mandated.

“But they’re still not reaching the more remote communities. There’s nobody pushing for it right now.”

And Kemmere isn’t optimistic that it’s going to get a whole lot better under the new Broadband Fund.

“It’s a problem in rural and remote areas that doesn’t seem to be going away,” he said. “The solutions that are being proposed are not keeping up with reality.”

The post Fast internet? An urban reality but a rural myth appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

Finance Minister Randy Delorey’s budget on Tuesday showed an overall $17.1 million net surplus position on $10.15 billion in total expenses and $10.26 billion in total revenues (minus $110.3 million in federal and municipal contributions earmarked for the Halifax Convention Centre project, deemed “not part of normal revenues”).

Apart from the new food bank tax credit, meant to encourage produce donations from farmers, the budget also calls for $3.5 million in new research, product development and market development funding for the province’s wine and vineyard sector.

That funding, Delorey said in his speech, “will pay for more research and development, and it will help our wine producers find new business in new markets… (and) means new products, new businesses and more opportunity in Nova Scotia.”

The wine sector funding follows a joint pledge in late March from the provincial and federal governments, worth $487,960 over two years, to set up a new wine analysis lab at Wolfville-based Acadia University.

The lab is expected to help meet the beverage sector’s “increasing demand” for chemical and sensory analysis services in Atlantic Canada. Wineries in the region today have to seek out such services at labs based in Ontario, Quebec or California.

For rural Nova Scotia, Tuesday’s budget also pledges another $6 million to back high-speed internet service for more homes and businesses.

Lack of available high-speed “is holding too many Nova Scotians back,” Delorey said, and also “hurts small businesses and places an unnecessary burden on potential entrepreneurs.”

Improving high-speed availability “won’t just benefit business (but) will create more connected citizens and consumers,” he said, committing the government to “work with our partners to develop a solution.”

The budget documents released Tuesday also commit the province’s Crop and Livestock Insurance Commission to develop new insurance programs in sectors such as grapes — and to introduce a “new, non-yield-based acreage loss program for vegetables” as an option to conventional “yield-based” insurance plans. — AGCanada.com Network

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New Brunswick-based Xplornet Communications recently announced it will offer high-speed, 25-megabytes-per-second (mbps) Internet service to all Canadians by July 2017, a move that may finally destroy the urban-rural digital divide.

“To be able to provide that kind of service to every household in Canada, to people who have not been able to get Internet before, it is not only a game changer for the industry, it’s life changing for the people who can now get online,” said Mark Goldberg, a telecommunications consultant in Ontario.

The company’s plan goes far beyond the federal government’s pledge, announced in February’s budget, to ensure rural Canadians have access to five-mbps service by the end of the decade.

“There is tons of skepticism in the market about our ability to deliver on the anticipated speeds, but we are confident what we’re working on is going to overdeliver,” said Chris Johnston, Xplornet’s executive vice-president of marketing.

“We’ll be doing two key things for customers. One, we’ll be delivering to homes that currently have fixed wireless or satellite service, just at faster speed. It’s blistering speed for applications consumers want right now. Two, we’ll be delivering to homes and businesses that currently don’t have Internet access at all or have really clunky dial-up access. Of about 14 million total dwellings in Canada, there are at minimum 2.5 million non-served or underserved dwellings.”

Xplornet will extend its network of towers, all of which will be upgraded starting this fall to offer 4G data service, and spend up to $475 million to buy capacity on two new satellites to be launched in 2016.

These satellites will “deliver speeds that have traditionally been associated with fibre optic cable,” said Johnston.

“With satellite technology, the lower cost to deliver (than fixed line technology) allows us to give a cost to customers not dissimilar to what that level of service would cost in an urban setting,” he said.

The cost will be “between $49 and $80 per month depending on the speed you want and data,” he added.

“The fact that a private company is making this kind of a commitment to invest in rural Canada on its own is tremendous,” said Goldberg.

Ottawa’s promise, which comes with a $305-million price tag, would have extended coverage to 250,000 but still left some rural and northern homes without broadband service, he said.

• From the Alberta Farmer Express: Grain commission moves producer car administration online

“Here we have a private-sector company investing to offer even higher speed to 100 per cent of Canada’s enormous landmass,” he said.

Xplornet’s pledge is not dependent on government funding, said Johnston.

“The recent announcement of federal funding is exciting for rural Canadians,” he said. “Xplornet may be eligible for some of those funds. However, our commitment to providing 100 per cent access to all Canadians will continue notwithstanding the federal government’s announcement.”

Already, the Alberta provincial government has committed to working with Xplornet. In January 2013, the province and Xplornet signed a deal to provide satellite Internet access to a potential 4,600 households across central Alberta in areas with population densities of less than 40 households per 100 square kilometres.

“We consulted extensively with industry on our rural Internet strategy, and Internet service providers told us it was not cost effective to build infrastructure in rural areas, so satellite technology was the recommended approach,” said Jessica Johnson, director of communications with Service Alberta. “Xplornet was chosen through an open and transparent procurement process — it is the only provider of new 4G high-speed satellite services available to these areas.”

Perhaps most surprising is that Xplornet, with about 240,000 customers, is a small player in the telecommunications market.

“We are punching above our weight level in terms of geographic reach,” said Johnston. “We are the only provider in the Internet marketplace that is national in nature, from coast to coast.”

But the business case for its high-speed initiative is solid, he said.

“We’ve invested hundreds of millions of dollars. We wouldn’t make that investment without real confidence.”

The company’s advantage is its focus on rural Canada, said Goldberg.

“You could say that anyone could invest in satellite technology,” he said. “But it’s one thing to have that bird in the air; it’s another to have a network across the country, dealers, people to do the installations and provide the service and support. That’s not easy to replicate.”

Johnston said the timing of its high-speed rollout through Alberta is not yet certain, but should be announced within a year. The transition from 3G to 4G capacity (necessary to increase Internet speed to 25 mbps) on the fixed wireless towers will start this year and be complete by the end of 2015.

The post Digital divide set to fall? appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.