COMMUNITIES and governments at all levels need to consider affordable broadband internet as a core service that must be available everywhere.
When it comes to technology, today’s farmers are on a roughly equal footing with their urban cousins, except when it comes to broadband internet access.
Affordable high speed internet is now almost universally available in urban settings but not on all farms, as our special report on pages 24-25 confirms.
Given the speed at which the internet develops, always in the context of virtually unlimited bandwidth, places that do not have broadband are quickly falling behind.
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Broadband connectivity is increasingly important for business and personal needs. It is an information highway bringing the world into homes. It allows interactive communication with business contacts, peers, friends and family, buying and selling of goods and services, market research, educational advancement and a host of entertainment options.
Community development experts and real estate professionals already say people make decisions about where to live based partly on whether broadband internet service is available. It can be as important as good roads, schools, health care and reliable utilities.
And soon broadband will become more important as the internet begins to take over functions that are now stored on personal computers, such as software.
Private companies and provincial governments have done a good job of extending the backbone of broadband infrastructure to most population centres.
More than 90 percent of Canada’s population now has broadband access, and wireless and satellite providers are slowly reaching into the countryside.
However, because of inadequate population and distance, it is not profitable for companies to extend service to the final 10 percent of the population, many of whom live on farms.
So it was welcome when the Conservative party promised during the recent election to invest $100 million per year for five years to complete the country’s broadband network.
The government will look to the private sector and other levels of government to match the money on a two for one basis for a total investment of $1.5 billion.
This promise, if carried through to budget allocation, will provide strong leadership. But a government program does not guarantee that the work will get done, nor does it identify who gets served first.
Rural communities should be as active in attracting broadband internet as they are in attracting business, hospitals, schools and roads.
Communities can hasten the delivery date to their location by organizing, gathering information on interested subscribers and developing the business case to attract a service provider.
In some cases, in actions reminiscent of the work done by rural telephone companies in the 1920s and ’30s, local groups and municipalities are creating their own internet provider companies to deliver local service.
However they do it, rural communities must have their own on-ramp to the information superhighway.
Bruce Dyck, Terry Fries, Barb Glen, D’Arce McMillan and Ken Zacharias collaborate in the writing of Western Producer editorials.
