EDMONTON – Despite struggling with service availability and molasses-slow download times, a new study has found rural Albertans go on-line almost as frequently as their urban counterparts.
The Criterion poll, which interviewed 100 people in the province’s small towns and rural areas in mid-September, showed 58 percent of people in rural Alberta surfed the internet.
Beverlee Loat, an Edmonton-based communications consultant, said the results provide a clear message for businesses with a rural market.
“When you think about shopping, you may not have a big mall nearby, but you can certainly shop on the web. People in rural communities do seem to be taking advantage of those opportunities,” said Loat, who will market the $500 report to businesses interested in web-based market research.
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Overall, the study found 69 percent of Albertans use the internet, with Calgary at the top at 77 percent followed by Edmonton at 71 percent. In Alberta’s smaller cities, such as Grande Prairie, Lethbridge, Red Deer, Fort McMurray and Medicine Hat, 69 percent of people polled surfed the web.
However, Criterion president Maureen McCaw believes more rural homes will plug into the wired world after a consortium led by Bell Intrigna completes a high-speed broadband network to every hospital, school, library and government facility in the province within three years.
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The $400 million network, announced in November, will allow faster connections and downloads, which McCaw sees as critical as websites increasingly switch to media-rich features such as live cybercasts that require high-speed connections.
“Part of the restriction in rural areas and small towns has been the access, particularly high speed,” said the Edmonton-based pollster, who has been taking the public’s pulse for 15 years. “With schools getting penetration to high-speed, it inevitably carries forward to the home.”
The Bell Intrigna consortium, which includes Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Nortel Networks and 360 Networks, also received $193 million in funding from the Alberta government to complete the so-called Supernet.
“The internet is for the 21st century what the telephone was to the 20th century. As a result, this may be the most important investment this government has made in rural Alberta since the elimination of party lines,” said science and technology minister Lorne Taylor in a news release announcing the decision.
Before the Criterion survey, the only other poll on internet usage was a Statistics Canada study conducted earlier this year. It showed Alberta had the highest percentage of Canadian households on the internet at 60 percent.
Criterion will continue to conduct the survey every three months but increase its sample size to 800 people, she said.
“With something like the internet, which changes quickly as it does, one of the reasons we will hold another survey in January is that Christmas will be a time of increased uptake. More people will buy computers and get onto the net.”
