This seeding season has taken me across a large number of municipalities in Saskatchewan.
Several of them had little or no data via cellular signal, and at a few points, there was no cellular reception at all.
I had heard that there were areas where farmers were having difficulty with cellular reception that they hoped to rely on for correction with some of their site specific guidance tools.
However, near our farm, which is located in the middle of one of the heaviest population centres in the province, south of Regina, I did find it a little alarming that there was little or no service.
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This caused me to stop in and see a few folks in the area about the state of their wireless data and high-speed internet.
We have relatively good broadband service via a specialized LTE signal on our farm, 38 kilometres south of Regina. However, others, even closer to the city, are not so fortunate.
I spoke with a producer whose home is a mere 24 kilometers from the provincial capital, and she has poor cellular coverage, often dropping calls in the middle of their farmyard. There is no data via cellular and slow internet service, amounting to less than 50 percent of the speed that even my phone provides via 3G at our farm.
And for that privilege she pays about $90 per month for broadband service that barely supports Netflix. As well, services like Netflix would throttle down her internet speed even further by mid-month for excessive bandwidth use.
Technology providers have repeatedly suggested that new tools will create dramatic improvements in bandwidth.
However, this largely hasn’t happened in rural areas. Internet providers and other data marketers do not serve some groups of users, no matter what they pay.
Parts of Manitoba and Alberta are even worse off than Saskatchewan.
Data is a tool of business and education. It creates skills and raises incomes. For the non-farming public, broadband and wireless data are tools that improve farmers’ abilities to be more efficient.
Federal and provincial governments need to step up and get this job done with appropriate utilities legislation, even though it will result in darned few votes.
