Doug Horte is only a 45 minute drive from Edmonton, but he might as well live in the middle of the bush. The internet access would be the same.
If Horte wants to check grain prices or transfer money on-line, he uses dial up internet service on his telephone and all the patience he can muster.
An internet banking transfer can take 15 minutes. Simple documents that a brokerage house recently sent him took half an hour to download.
“It’s like having a horse and buggy,” said Horte, a grain farmer from Kingman. “Dial up internet is so time consuming, it’s just not viable.”
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High speed internet, the utility that most people living in cities and towns take for granted, is a location lottery for rural families.
They lose the lottery if towering spruce trees surround their house, if their home is too far from an internet tower or if they live in an isolated area.
They hit the jackpot if their farm house is on a hill or a local internet business has installed an internet dish on the nearby grain elevator or church steeple.
“I don’t know how we got into such a mish mash,” said Horte, who believes the provincial government should have shown more leadership in providing service in rural Alberta.
A report by the Alberta Council of Technologies released in June reached the same conclusion: promises of rural broadband in Alberta haven’t been met.
Seven years ago, the Alberta government announced Alberta SuperNet, a fibre optic network that would connect rural communities to the world with high speed internet.
The SuperNet took fibre optic cable to libraries, schools and hospitals in 429 communities, but Perry Kinkaide, president of Alberta Council of Technologies, said that’s where it stalled.
The expectation was that local entrepreneurs and larger companies would connect the rest of the community. However, many communities are still waiting while others have been connected with questionable service and standards.
“It was overpromised and underdelivered,” said Kinkaide, who believes provincial governments should take the lead in providing rural high speed internet if they don’t want rural areas to become wastelands.
“The market has failed and leadership has disappeared,” he said.
Richard Harpe, a councillor for the northern Alberta county of Grande Prairie, said the local government gave up waiting for private internet providers to build towers in isolated pockets of the county.
Last December, it budgeted $260,000 to build 26 towers in rural areas that were experiencing difficulty receiving high speed service.
He said if private companies provide service only in areas with high populations and a guaranteed profit, the county could become like the old co-operatives that worked together to bring telephone, power and gas to rural areas.
“The small towns within the county were getting plenty of service, but nobody away from the populated areas. The companies cherry picked. It left the people on the outlining areas at a real disadvantage,” said Harpe, who had only dial up internet service on his farm.
Working with a local internet provider, rural homes and businesses were surveyed, contracts signed and towers installed.
Eight months later, only six towers need to be subsidized by the county because they lack enough customers to make them profitable.
“So far we’ve been very successful,” Harpe said.
“I think the companies hadn’t done any research to realize how many people actually wanted high speed internet service.”
