Hope for truly high speed Internet in Tumbler Ridge remains merely that: hope.
There have been two attempts in the last two years that both went off the rails.
The first pitch fell apart in mid-2019.
In April of 2019, Council approved signing a contract with the Peace Region Internet Society (PRIS) to provide $800,000 in funding to wire the town for fibre optic, contingent on PRIS receiving $1.15 million in grants from NDIT and Connecting British Columbia.
While the grants came through, PRIS did not, and the partnership was placed on hold, due to a change in the company’s administrative leadership and inability to manage such a large project during their transition.
With the departure of their head administrator, the District again went looking for help bridging the last mile, between the Telus switch—which has fibre—and resident’s doorstep—which connects via the phone line, using a process called DSL. While the process has allowed Telus to bring in “high-speed” Internet to Tumbler, much of the town taps out at 15 Mbps (Megabytes per second) up and 1 Mbps down, which fails the government’s target of “50 Mbps up/10 Mbps down” across most of rural Canada by 2026.
According to Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, about 45 percent of the residents in town are able to get speeds that meet this target. People within about a km of the Telus exchange are able to get up to 75 Mbps (Megabytes per second) down and 15 Mbps up. This means portions of the middle bench are able to get speeds up to five times faster than the rest of the town, creating a disparity of service in town, much like the disparity between urban and rural Internet across the country.
And, while the service is theoretically available around the Telus exchange as well as a second communications box on the upper bench, many people are not able to get the service as Telus has no more switches available for new customers on the upper bench.
That disparity is something the Canadian Government is striving to overcome. Earlier this month, the government held a news conference to launch a $1.75 billion universal broadband fund. This fund was first talked about in the 2019 budget, but — after some pandemic related delays — is back on track.
“We were ready to go in March with the new Universal Broadband Fund and then the pandemic hit,” Rural Economic Development Minister Maryam Monsef says.
The goal is to connect 98 per cent of Canadians to high-speed by 2026, and the rest of the country by 2030.
About $150 million will go towards getting communities connected by next fall.
The pandemic has revealed the cracks in the system, as many rural Canadians are stuck at home trying to work with terrible Internet.
$600 million is going towards satellite Internet for the far north.
“Good reliable Internet isn’t a luxury. It’s a basic service,” said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. “Now more than ever, a video chat cutting out during a meeting or a connection that’s too slow to upload a school assignment — that’s not just a hassle, that’s a barrier.”
After the PRIS option fell through, the district turned back to Telus, whom they had been talking with previously. At the time, Telus had said they were looking at five years at the earliest before coming into town with a fibre-to-the-doorstep solution.
The District was able to convince Telus, that, if they were able to get a grant from the Connecting British Columbia Program, they would be willing to send a team to town.
For a big company like Telus, the small population of Tumbler Ridge makes installing fibre to the doorstep a poor business case. Too expensive for too few people. But, backed by a grant that meets the federal government’s target speeds of 50 Mbps up, 10 Mbps down, Telus was willing to do it.
The initial application, though, failed to meet the requirements, but Telus was invited to apply again for the next intake.
They didn’t.
Which left Tumbler Ridge in the same situation it was in before. The town is prepped for fibre, with underground conduit. There is fibre running to the community. But nobody is willing to make that last mile connection.
Or at least, nobody was, until now.
On Monday, November 16, a company called Canadian Fibre Optic (CFO) appeared (virtually) before council to discuss their hopes to bring fibre to the doorstep to Tumbler Ridge. CFO is a peace country based rural, residential, and industrial Internet provider with the ability to lay lines in house.
The company is currently laying fibre to the town of Grande Cache. This is, says Jodi Bloomer-Kaput, a perfect companion community for Tumbler Ridge.
“I view Grande Cache as a sister community for Tumbler Ridge,” says Bloomer-Kaput. Bloomer-Kaput is Co-Founder and Chief Business Development Officer for CFO. The company is working in partnership with Calix-Cloud, who worked on the original PRIS proposal, and Sandbox Systems, who do financial modeling. “In Grande Cache there are about 1700 premises. The town was about 200 km from nearest reliable fibre. They had less than 1 Gbps of bandwidth for the entire community. It’s a mining town surrounded by oil and gas forestry, and they are desperate for reliable and affordable high speed.”
Of course, it isn’t exactly like Tumbler Ridge, but she says, the company has spent a lot of time thinking about how to get fibre to the doorstep in the community, and is able to bring that experience with them to Tumbler Ridge. “Our plan was to figure out how to build fibre to the premise,” she says. “We decided to connect to our fibre optic backbone and the plan is to bring big bandwidth to Grande Cache to properly serve the community. It was important engage industry with guaranteed service levels. Rather than the coal mine say we will take whatever we can get, we offer a 99.999 percent uptime. We like to meet industry where they are.”
Unlike Grande Cache, though, Tumbler Ridge already has conduit in the ground. “Tumbler Ridge sure did things right when the town was built, in overbuilding conduit, putting a five inch conduit in when the ground was open was a wise step to take,” she says.
And accessing this conduit is key to their proposal. “I’ll cut to the chase,” she says. “We are looking for a way to find a way to access that conduit to build you guys a resilient and scalable fibre optic network. We are looking at bringing fibre throughout the community. Fibre to every home, and the way we are proposing to do that is access existing telecommunications duct.”
Mark Halwa, President of Sandbox Systems puts it more bluntly. “The conduit is the biggest fundamental that needs to be addressed right out of the gate. Does Tumbler Ridge have an agreement, or would you be willing to pursue getting an agreement? That’s what makes the whole network work. You don’t want someone to bring in a bunch of heavy equipment and mess up the roads. My approach is to focus on fundamentals of the network and make sure it works. I can put together plans and find the money, but I like to focus on what we need to make the network work from the outset to get it done. Where are you at in finding an agreement that governs it?”
The conduit is old BC Tel infrastructure. It is—as far as anyone knows—owned by Telus, says the Mayor.
These types of conduit networks are supposed to be governed by an MAA—a Municipal Access Agreement—says Halwa. That agreement says how the conduit will be used, how much it costs to use, how long the agreement is in place. “I realize this was a long time ago, and it could be hard to dig up records,” he says, “But one idea to call up Telus and ask them for a copy of whatever permit they have to operate in the municipality. If they don’t have one, get together and come up with agreement. If there is one, you are bound by the terms of it. Can still have a conversation to get to a win-win situation. If not, you can develop a MAA that incorporates open access. Open access is like the roads. Everybody gets to use the roads; conduit should be the same thing. When everyone has access, you get competition. That’s what you’d like to have. We’d like to build you a network that had us there, Telus there. But you really need access to conduit.”
The next step, says Halwa, would be to hire a telecom lawyer to put together the MAA to get this fundamental thing out of the way. “That’s a good starting place. Let’s figure out the conduit, then we can build you a network.”
If the proposal were able to access the conduit, the next stage would be hook up the fibre network. The plan, says Bloomer-Kaput, would be to use the current Telus Fibre line to start with, which would allow them to get up and running quickly. But there is also the option to connect to CFO’s network in Hythe, a build of about 165 km. “We have done some preliminary costing on that route,” she says. “It would take a little longer, and we’d need to make sure we are understanding the wants and needs of industry, but we are looking at diversity. It is very possible. That would bring the added benefit of connecting industry along the way.”
But how would fibre compare to what we’ve got now? Jason Bailey, Regional Vice President for Canada for Calix, says the slowest fibre would be would be 100 mbps, so twice as fast as the government’s minimum allotment down, and ten times up. In Grande Cache, they are rolling out three plans: 100 mbps, 250 mpbs and 1000mbps (or one gigabyte per second)
“If you take a look at the different media out there, you have wireless, coaxial and fibre,” says Bailey. “Fibre optic completely surpasses the other media with its capacity to carry data. It has the ability to do terabytes per second. You put it in once and you can keep adding on to it over time. While the CRTC is proposing 50/10 as the universal service standard, many people think that’s not enough over time to meet the demand of consumers in the future. Fibre gives you the ability to keep changing services over time without changing infrastructure.”
But what happens if Telus doesn’t give access to the conduit. Does that mean it’s a done deal?
No, says Halwa. “These are still your roads. It’s still within your municipality, it’s your community. That holds some weight. And if the conversation were to go sideways, just remember the telecommunications act came about modeled on the railway act. There’s lots of opportunity to discuss with them. I wouldn’t say it’s over.”
Besides, he says, while Telus is supposed to have these agreements in place, the fact is, not a lot of them actually get signed, so there’s a good chance there’s not one in effect.
“It’s a realistically simple process,” says Bloomer-Kaput. “We’re not putting people on the moon, we’re just running fibre. We want to keep it simple, engage in a way that will provide most benefit for community. It sometimes seems the municipalities we talk to have lost hope that rural connectivity is possible. Telus and Bell are spending billions in the province, but the rural communities aren’t seeing any benefit. We want to assure you that building rural fibre optic networks is possible.”
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
