Greg Dow faces a problem all too familiar to many rural Canadians.
He’s stuck with dial-up internet connection that he hates.
“It’s not very good,” said the farmer from Craik, Sask.
“They say we get 26.4 (kilobytes per second). We never get that. It freezes up all the time. It’s so slow that I can’t upload most of the attachments for my e-mails that other people send.”
However, Dow is not quite as stuck as some.
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He has the option of upgrading to wireless broadband and has looked at both wireless internet provided by his regional telephone provider, SaskTel, off its cell phone towers, and at other options provided by companies such as Yourlink and satellite fed Xplornet.
Based on discussions he’s had with neighbours who have gone with these types of broadband, Dow is in no hurry to install a dish. He said the extra cost is not justified in light of the inconsistency of the service.
“My neighbour has it. He gets an hour of high-speed a day before they knock him back to dial-up speed. That’s just a waste of time.”
Commonly referred to as throttling, this “knocking back” is often the result of what the industry calls internet traffic management practices.
They are techniques used by internet service providers to deal with congested networks. By restricting the rate at which customers can use bandwidth, the providers try to ensure that service disruptions are kept to a minimum.
Throttling affects urban and rural users, and until recently it wasn’t regulated.
Many people didn’t know the service they were paying for was subject to this kind of reduction without notice. The Canadian Radio and Telecommunication Commission addressed one of the most notorious cases of throttling in a 2008 decision concerning Bell Canada. Bell was restricting the data flow of customers using peer-to-peer protocols.
Commonly associated with the often-illegal file sharing of music and movies, the protocols are also used legitimately by software companies to do upgrades, said Tom Copeland, chair of the Canadian Association of Internet Providers.
The CRTC upheld the right of Bell to control traffic on its networks but laid out provisions to ensure that customers would be informed of the practices.
It also ruled that the large primary service providers couldn’t apply traffic management unevenly to smaller secondary providers who buy bandwidth from them wholesale.
Throttling affects all internet users, but it has a pronounced effect in rural areas, where broadband speeds start lower than they do in urban settings.
Copeland said most rural users receive speeds of 1.5 megabytes per second from either their satellite internet or radio or microwave supplier. Many rural services are also oversubscribed, which necessitates throttling.
“It’s not necessarily on the final mile that its oversubscribed, although that does happen, more often than not, especially with a point-to-multipoint wireless,” he said.
“What you find is that the backhaul from their wireless point of presence, or from their tower, to the ISP’s point of presence and then out to the net is where that bottleneck often exists, in that many of these rural communities don’t have sufficient bandwidth coming into them over the big pipe that it can be effectively redistributed to the locals.”
He said as a result, rural high-speed internet users receive far slower connections.
These service quality issues come as the federal government spends $200 million to extend broadband access to the last parts of the country where it is still unavailable.
The government’s Rural Broadband Initiative is an Industry Canada program that has distributed grants to move internet service providers into remote areas.
Bernard Parkinson, president of Platinum Communications, thinks the federal program suffers from flaws greater than just broadband limitations.
He also thinks the government is spending money without a clear picture of who needs the service.
“That’s the big mystery – how much of rural Canada is covered?” he said. “The government of Alberta thinks that out of 1.2 million in the underserved market, approximately 30 percent aren’t covered. But I don’t know what they’re basing that data on. I think the data, because it had to be voluntarily produced by ISPs, is probably incomplete. I suspect more people are covered than Industry Canada and the government of Alberta think there are.”
Parkinson said some grants have been allotted to companies in areas where broadband is already available.
He also said the program didn’t go far enough.
“As much as $225 million was nice, it was useless. That amount of money to ensure that the last two percent can get a meg and a half is ludicrous,” said Parkinson.
Copeland said he would have preferred the government plan for the country’s future needs.
“Unfortunately the program was politically motivated and that $225 million, or a good chunk of it, is going to physical resources rather than long-term strategy.”
One place where the government’s initiative is not meeting with criticism is in the community of Donalda, Alta. The Donalda and District Agricultural Society secured a grant from the program to bring in a small Cam-rose-based service provider to provide wireless broadband.
The society will take a share of the profits, which it will then use to fund initiatives in the community.
“It’s a great initiative. Otherwise, we’d have to wait for the bigger companies,” said society treasurer Julie Hebbes.
“Whether it’s, ‘I’m going on the web for my farm making better decisions,’ it makes more experts accessible to me as a business owner.”
She also appreciates the potential revenue for the agricultural society. Like many small communities, Donalda is suffering a period of decline.
“That’s basically it: try to keep Donalda sustainable. Everybody’s moving away from the farm. Nobody’s coming back. Our volunteer base and our school’s going down in population. It’s sort of depressing really, so this was a nice positive.”
Parkinson said that even though rural broadband may suffer from limitations, the country needs to make the investment to modernize its communications infrastructure.
He equates the implementation of broadband with the push to provide electricity to rural areas after the Second World War.
“The communications technology we have has served us well as a resource economy, as coal miners and wood choppers. Broadband is what the country needs to develop a value-added economy.”
Parkinson said putting all Canadians on an equal footing to use the next wave of internet services may cost more than $5 billion but will be worth it.
Dow grudgingly accepts that while he may not be rushing out to sign up for broadband, future generations of farmers will have little choice.
“If I was looking to expand or grow my business, I would have to be in that system,” he said.
However, Dow is far from an optimist when it comes to the ability of government and industry to successfully deploy new technology.
“They’re so busy getting 3G and Wi-Fi and all this crap into the cities, I still can’t make a goddamn cellphone call on half my land.”
