In the works: an ambitious plan to bring High-Speed Internat to rural western Ontario
Friday, April 4, 2014
The Western Ontario Wardens' Caucus wants to build a 42,000-square-kilometre fibre optic network to serve nearly three million people from the eastern edge of Wellington County west to Windsor and north to Georgian Bay. But public sector involvement and buy-in from other players is key
by DON STONEMAN
When the snow plow took out the telephone box across the road from Grey County cash crop and livestock farmer Don Lewis's farm office in early February, he didn't care if it got fixed.
A landline has become pretty much redundant, says Lewis, a partner in Lewis Farms along with his sons. "We use everything but the landline," he says, in an operation where communication is key. Lewis wouldn't be surprised to see landlines eventually disappear altogether.
"Communications are a major expense," Lewis allows, about $20,000 a year on $2 million in sales.
The Lewis farm feeds more than 8,000 lambs at a time in Southgate township and has both a ewe breeding flock and an Angus cattle herd. The family farms 5,000 acres within a 20-kilometre circle of the base farm near Holstein, annually applying 7,000-8,000 tonnes of manure, with GPS for accuracy, on 2,000 acres of land. Trucks run livestock to the U.S. Midwest and to-and-from the Prairies.
Lewis says he has always striven to be "ahead of the curve" in using technology on the farm and elsewhere. He says he was the first warden of the County of Grey to use a BlackBerry, and last year that was the major communication tool on the farm. This year, staff will be operating with tablets, and in February a technician was loading software into the devices to help staff with their work.
"Doesn't matter whether you're running trucks to the United States or spreading manure; everyone wants to know what you are doing," says Lewis. "I get the guys to file religiously at the end of the day where they put manure and how much. They can't always do it.
So I need a platform where we can communicate between our equipment and our office."
Lewis, who is 64, has Bell Internet service, but finds that it is not very fast. And he notes that his crop consultant, who supplies him electronically with crop reports following field scouting trips, says some of her clients still have only dial-up access.
"People say (Internet access) needs to be more affordable," Lewis says. Whether Internet service costs too much or not may be debatable, but there is no debate about the need for much better access to Internet and the services it provides, or could provide, in rural Ontario.
The wardens of most western Ontario counties clearly believe that lack of access to ultra-high-speed, broadband Internet service disadvantages rural Ontario residents and businesses of all sorts, including farmers, their suppliers and customers. An ambitious $238-million plan to change that is in the works.
The Western Ontario Wardens' Caucus (WOWC), which represents chairs of the county councils, wants the federal government, the province, municipalities and private business to help build a 42,000-square-kilometre fibre optic network, a path for ultra-high-speed Internet service to nearly three million people – many of them in rural areas – from the eastern edge of Wellington County west to Windsor and north to Georgian Bay, by 2018.
The WOWC initiative, dubbed SWIFT (SouthWestern Integrated Fibre Technology), will not put fibre optic at every farm gate, stresses Geoff Hogan, Grey's director of Information Technology and secretary of the wardens' caucus broadband steering committee. It would instead create what he calls "open access" to the trunk lines which are owned by large telecom companies. "If we give (small companies) access to the Internet in the best way possible, at the lowest cost possible, they will be able to spread the last mile out to residents quickly," and that will increase competition.
SWIFT calls for 310 points of access to that cable, located according to geography rather than in urban centres where Internet access is normally deployed. These access points might be in farming country that is sparsely populated (as low as four persons per square kilometre).
While no specific points are mentioned in a 202-page study about the SWIFT project, Hogan and other proponents mention Punkey Doodles Corners, the butt of many "boonie" jokes over the years. Punkey Doodles is a collection of houses at an intersection north of Woodstock where the counties of Oxford and Perth meet the Region of Waterloo.
That $238 million price tag for the SWIFT project could be 30 per cent less if existing fibre optic installations can be brought into play. The vision for SWIFT is that more than 20 incumbents currently providing Internet services would be involved.
Large files on demand
The aim is to get "scalable" broadband to everyone who needs it in western Ontario, "scalable" being an industry term which means the infrastructure can provide continually available access to higher speeds for sending large files on demand.
As explained by Hogan, "you ask (your provider) for more and you get more without having to replace your equipment. They turn a switch and up it goes." Many current Internet infrastructure technologies are no faster than the speed of sound. On the other hand, fibre optic paired with laser is the ultimate, he says; nothing is faster than the speed of light.
Between 2007 and 2012, the Ontario government spent $32.7 million on 52 projects to bring broadband Internet to rural areas of the province via wireless connections. (See "Rural Connections: A way to bring broadband to rural Ontario – or Corporate Welfare?" Better Farming, January 2009.) Service providers, funded by Rural Connections money, provided wireless customers with download speeds of at least 1.5 megabits per second – far faster than dial-up but increasingly less adequate today, according to many users. But Grey County's Lewis and others point out that there are still rural residents with no other service available other than dial-up or exorbitantly expensive satellite connections.
In eastern Ontario, where economic development has long been a concern, wardens are moving ahead with a $170-million plan to bring high-speed fibre optic connections to all counties from the City of Kawartha Lakes east to the Quebec border, including Renfrew, Glengarry and the City of Kingston. Federal and provincial governments committed $55 million each. Eastern Ontario Wardens Caucus Inc. contributed $10 million, with municipalities and private sector partners providing the remaining funding.
Economic development is now a concern west of Toronto as well. The closings of the Heinz plant in Leamington and Kellogg factory in London were the final straws. "Ontario lost 39,000 jobs in December," notes a grim-sounding Wellington County warden Chris White, mayor of Guelph-Eramosa township. "We never looked at economic development until two years ago. It's doesn't take you long to go from doing well to doing poorly."
But money is short and the expenditures needed to move towards ultra-high broadband are a stretch. White says a $25,000 request to fund Wellington's share of a business planning scheme for SWIFT wasn't in the budget passed on Jan. 30. There is pressure to fund hospitals, and the province has cut $600,000 from the grant it gives the county to make up for services downloaded in the Harris government era. Many residents are on fixed incomes.
Still, agriculture is important, White says, and at press time the council was scheduled to view another presentation from the SWIFT committee, with one possibility being that it might be funded from reserves.
Perth County Council also remains ambivalent. "A lot of our county already has fibre to the house and to the business," says Perth warden Robert Wilhelm of Nairn. Meanwhile, Stratford is already recognized internationally as an "intelligent" community because it has a high level of connectivity. Independent companies and co-operatives in Perth – Quadro, Tuckersmith and Mornington Communications – have put fibre into some communities.
Wilhelm notes that Perth has approved spending for a Southwest Economic Alliance (SWEA) project to benchmark intelligent communities for connectivity. The county council expects the extensive surveys involved in benchmarking will reveal what the needs are of residents and businesses "and then we will see whether something like rural broadband is beneficial in our county."
"There isn't a lot of government money out there right now," says SWEA's president, Serge Lavoie, based in St. Thomas. SWEA is an alliance of municipalities, the broader public sector, universities and colleges, as well as private sector companies, and is devoted to economic development of all sorts in southwestern Ontario, including agriculture. Lavoie says SWEA's goal is to "get everyone co-operating around joint economic development … building the capacity for change." The SWIFT initiative involves "piecing together" 15 counties and seven separated cities into an intelligent region initiative by using the Internet.
Lavoie says Perth supported the SWEA intelligent region initiative, but put off for a year making a decision on SWIFT. That $25,000 request is for this year, Lavoie says, "but everybody knows, that after the next phase, every municipality is going to be asked to invest anywhere from $600,000 to $1 million for the actual building of the network. They certainly haven't closed the door on this. They simply said ‘we have to do it in affordable stages,'" Lavoie says, soft-pedalling Perth's hesitation.
Essential in the modern world
Lavoie says SWEA is preparing the business case for building the SWIFT network by working with Cisco Canada's Smart & Connected Communities Unit, based in Lima, Peru. (Multinational Cisco Systems, based in California, designs, manufactures and sells networking equipment.) The benchmarking project, which measures gains in employment from better broadband access, is multi-year and aspects are ongoing.
The $25,000 per county will pay for "well-researched" business planning, explains professor Helen Hambly-Odame, of the University of Guelph's faculty of environmental design and rural development. Hambly-Odame is passionate about raising sociologically and economically disadvantaged rural groups to a higher level. Access to high-speed broadband is absolutely essential to doing business in the modern world, she says.
Ten years ago, she says, Canada was ranked in the top five countries in the world for connectivity, and governments were enthusiastic about digital economies. Today, Canada has slipped to 25th place, behind emerging economies such as Vietnam. That 202-page draft plan for SWIFT approved by the wardens last fall is a combination of a feasibility study and a GAP analysis (a comparison of current performance with potential performance.)
The debate at county councils and the wardens' caucus has been going on for a while. "To me, it is essential to stay current with the rest of the world in the interests of sustainable economic activity," says Grey's past-warden, Duncan McKinlay of Ravenna. "Farmers that I know use the Internet all the time and are frustrated that they can't download data fast enough. It is important in agriculture to get access to information quickly."
Grey's current warden and chair of the Western Ontario Wardens' Caucus, Brian Milne, says bringing ultra-high-speed Internet to the farm presents unknown opportunities, as did rural electrification in the 1940s. "We really don't know what the future holds, what we can put on the end of this wire." Farmers would benefit from better health care and educational opportunities, too.
The proposed fibre optic network would have three distinct parts – a transport network connecting all major centres operating at 100 gigabits per second (Gbps); an aggregation network connecting to aggregation points in each county at 40 Gbps; and an access fibre optic connected to "access nodes" in cities, towns, villages and hamlets in the region (think Punkey Doodles Corners), each capable of carrying 10 Gbps.
SWIFT would provide up to one Gbps of bandwidth for residential and small-business users with bandwidth up to 100 Gbps for large businesses, public sector school boards and hospitals. That is many times faster than current speeds available via wireless or copper wire connections. (See accompanying chart for speed comparisons.)
One of the small companies seeing potential in the western Ontario system when it is installed is Silo Wireless, based in Brant County, but only if the large telecoms don't monopolize the situation, says owner Andreas Wiatowski.
Wiatowski made investments and took advantage of $620,000 in grants available via the Ontario agriculture ministry's Rural Connections with Brant County in 2009 and built $1.4 million of additions and improvements on the network, which serves nearly 4,000 homes and businesses, including the Six Nations reserve. His service area now extends from Woodstock to Ancaster and the edge of Port Dover to Cambridge.
Wiatowski's customers' consumption habits have changed. In the evenings, 30 to 35 per cent of traffic on the network is used for streaming media such as Netflix and YouTube, "a quantum shift," he says, from browsing the Internet and downloading emails. "My biggest challenge is managing overall capacity across the network even with the infrastructure we have in place," Wiatowski says.
Wiatowski has a few towers with fibre connected to them. He also has licensed, highly reliable and expensive wireless technology. He would prefer fibre, since it means a lot less chance of outages.
Help small players, too
Tom Sullivan, president and CEO of Wightman Telecom, a small independent company located in Clifford with a considerably investment in low-density population areas, tempers praise of the western wardens' SWIFT proposal with a warning.
If there's government funding for companies to develop broadband systems, "it needs to serve unserved territory, not finance competition in existing served territory," he says. "It needs to be put out in a manner that allows the small telecommunication companies to play as well as the large ones."
Sullivan lives and farms in one of those unserved areas, only four miles from a Bell station in Mount Forest. Sullivan says he only has access to dial-up Internet service and he can brew a pot of coffee before a website page finishes appearing on his computer screen.
Getting those small independents, the large incumbents and the counties onside is not the only challenge the SWIFT proposal faces.
According to the SWIFT study, the provincial ministry of government services is in the process of procuring a new province-wide network for the Ontario Public Service's offices (GONET) and appears to be favouring a "winner take all" procurement policy, which the study says threatens the SWIFT concept. The study says SWIFT needs public sector organizations as "anchor tenants" to make its system financially sustainable. If SWIFT and the local access provider partners aren't selected as the regional providers of the new Ontario public service GONET system, "it could seriously undermine the viability of the SWIFT and local providers."
Grey County's Hogan argues the big companies should take part in SWIFT; it is about a public expenditure making the private sector work better. He says there are many pieces of "stranded" fibre optic cable in Grey County alone, connected at both ends by low-capacity copper wire connections. These under-utilized assets of large telecom companies could be much better used.
Investments by large companies, Hogan argues, "are dictated by the bottom line. They will always do everything first in urban environments where they get a quicker and larger payback on their investments. We believe that rural areas, the farmers and everyone else need just the same services and that our economy depends on folks like that getting access to those kinds of services."
Deploying broadband has been successful for eastern Ontario wardens, but their circumstances are different, says Wellington County's Chris White. "They had a $10-million fund we never had access to. It's only in the last couple of years that western Ontario has suffered such an economic downturn that we are looking for some support."
For his part, Grey's warden Milne, chair of the Western Ontario Wardens' Caucus, is frustrated that not all counties are playing. Leaving two counties out won't squelch the whole plan, he says; the costs of the next phase will be shared among fewer players. But it makes him question the value of the caucus. "If we are going to start hiving off every time we decide ‘this doesn't affect us,' that defeats the purpose of the whole thing and we may as well go home."
County budgets were still being finalized as the winter progressed. "I'm still hoping everyone will be in," says Milne. Hogan says the time has never been better than now. "If we are ever going to spend more government money on infrastructure, we need to spend money on infrastructure that is scalable and (does) not have to be replaced going forward."
Sheep farmer Lewis would like to see the project go forward, too, and actually use the "stranded" fibre optic lines that are around Grey County. He says there's a fibre optic cable buried on land beside his farm, but he can't connect to it. It's been there a long time and, as far as he knows, it unused. "All it does now is cause us problems when we dig a culvert in or put up a fence." BF