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Alberta, Canada Goes Broadband -- By 2004 202

Posted by timothy from the what-happened-to-ip-over-powerlines?! dept.
jasonu writes: "According to this article in The Calgary Herald, every town in Alberta, Canada with either a hospital, a school, a government office or a library will be getting wired for high speed Internet access by the end of 2004. I will finally get broadband!!" Though the article says this will be an "optical fiber network," it doesn't detail the mechanics of it, nor expected data capabilities -- but for $40 a month (Canadian), anything that sounds even remotely "high speed" sounds pretty impressive.
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Alberta, Canada Goes Broadband -- BY 2004 More

Alberta, Canada Goes Broadband -- BY 2004

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  • Hmm, this worries me. We just recently moved to Alberta from New Zealand (major upgrade in standard of living (IMHO):) and my daughter is rather obsessed by moose (I got her a Gund moose when I came up for my job interview).

    Bill - aka taniwha
    --

  • So I can figure out why the heck anyone cares
  • Less talky, more spendy!

    --------
  • The city of Ashland, OR set up a broadband fiber network too. fer $35US/mo you can get 5Mbit tap off a 1000baseFX net run under the streets.

    It's rather nice (Ashland fiber Network [ashlandfiber.net])

  • I'm from Saskatchewan, and we've had broadband here for years. It seems that Sasktel went crazy-funky a number of years ago and laid fiber lines all over the place. Not many high-capacity fiber pipes except to major cities like Saskatoon and Regina, but mostly smaller fiber lines just going all over the place. In fact, Sasktel claims we were the first place in North America to get ADSL. I makes me wonder whenever I think of that and I hear about people in the States who still don't have broadband in cities twice as large as Saskatoon (my hometown). Ah, well. Back to surfing with cable (uncapped, natch).

    On a semi-offtopic note...

    A friend of mine was telling me about this man who moved into her hometown (small farming town, the armpit of Saskatchewan, basically) and the company he worked for paid to have a dedicated T1 laid to his doorstep. We could only imagine the cost of it.
  • I posted the same article yesterday morning, and it was never reported. What a great filtering process /. has. In any case, I'm glad the story got up here.

    However, the Canadian initiative and the Albertan initiative are completely different. The Liberal federal government is planning to wire all of Canada if they get re-elected. The broadband access in Alberta is being mostly subsidized ($200 million of the $300 million) by the Provincial government. Telus didn't get the contract, Bell Canada did. Telus is threatening to lay their own province wide cable to compete.

    To reiterate, the Alberta plan is already in action. The Federal plan is not, and won't be unless we re-elect the Liberal Party.
  • All of Canada is fibre - no real point, I'm just proud of Canada :-) VOTE LIBERAL!

    Isn't our overall network weaker/slower because we have a single fiber backbone? I'm not an expert (probably obvious..:]) but I know everything seems to have to go through UUNET. Doesn't that mean that our packets have to cross more routers? Or am I insane?

  • It's not as if we don't have the funds for such an endeavor. A friend of mind crunched the numbers and figured that the cost of one aircraft carrier could put a computer on ever classroom desk of every school of every town, city, and state in this country (and we're in the processes of building a new one right now, right?).

    Just because you would be able to put a computer in every classroom of every school doesn't mean that this is where the resources should be spent. It's a controversial thing to say on slashdot, but computers aren't the solution to every problem. The failing education system is probably one of those problems.


    --
  • If the gov't gets into the broadband isp business, it will effectively hand itself a mononpoly. ood luck getting good service...

  • Re:What a waste... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    What kind of moron are you that thinks farmers don't use internet. I know farmers use it for:

    1) Purchase of Farming Supplies
    2) Agricultural Research on crop yeilds for various fertilizers and pesticides
    3) Water quality anaylisis statistics
    4) Environmental statistics
    5) Internet Banking
    6) Review of government funding and regulations.


    Basically running their business like any other business man would. It's arogant to think that they are less educated or capable than you.
  • No kidding.I use Telus's ADSL in BC and I'm more then happy with it.It's way over the quallity of what Rogers@Home has.And they don't care how many computers I have hooked up to their service as long as they're hidden behind a NAT box. Here is BC at least people are moving in waves from Rogers to Telus's ADSL .
  • Thing is though, the gov won't be making any profit off this, because, naturally, Klien felt it best to leave ownership fully in Bell's hands after paying 2/3 of the cost for them... Isn't this what the Alberta Advantage has always refered to? Government handing out lucrative new ways for huge, non-competitive corporations to make large profits off the locals?
  • Considering Alberta has opened the door to a two tier helath system a majority of Albetan citizens are against, and that Ralph 'I been in politics for 20 years and know better than my voters' Klien has permitted this opening upon the backs of Albeta's lower economic classes, I consider this a sin against democracy. Instead of increasing the gap between 'haves' and 'have nots' lets eliminate it!
  • Are you retarded?

    You just described every consumer grade ISP on the planet. YOU DON'T PAY ENOUGH FOR THEM TO GIVE A SHIT. Get used to it. If you want real performance/service you have to pay for a commercial grade connection.

  • God bless socialism. (Score:5)

    by TheDullBlade ( 28998 ) on Friday November 03, 2000 @09:23PM (#650036)
    This is what I love about Canada: getting all these great things handed to us for far under cost, if not altogether free!

    Education, health care, even food and shelter (if you can't afford it yourself). What a generous government to give so freely of its own money! I sure wouldn't give my money away like that!

    I look forward to the inevitable day when our wonderful government gives us everything we need, and none of us need to work. I'm definitely voting Liberal!

    --------
  • Where do you get your statics from...? Other posts here say ~500,000 rural people only, quite close to what I have said.

  • Canada (Score:3)

    by talonyx ( 125221 ) on Friday November 03, 2000 @09:26PM (#650038)
    ...Canada has the best internet access in the world.

    Really.

    Especially BC, where I am. DSL is 1.5 megabit and cable is the same. Everyone can get cable if you live in a city (i mean, if your city has cable).

    Canada has the highest percentage of broadband users per capita of internet users in the world.

    This isn't huge news. It's just cool that Telus is finally putting it's huge resources to work.

    I'm hoping for fiber to the house by 2010.
  • When did pavement come about? How many decades ago? When did DSL come out?

    Now which advances faster?

  • Umm I dunno being from Ottawa and all. 1 million people is more than Calgary or Edmonton (Not alot). And being (labeled) Silicon Valley North probably makes it pretty damn important. Oil isn't everything.
  • Odd how this comes right before an election, isn't it? And everyone 16 or over will receive $150 no-questions-asked from the government late this month, and another $150 next April to "offset high energy costs". Gotta love budget surpluses.
  • Browsing at three right now I see at least one post stating "Why do I have to pay for this?". Well, it seems that in terms of a long term goal the governement can actually make a profit from providing cheap high speed internet access to the masses. The other reason they chose to do this is to give their province a head start into the communications market, which means big bucks for everyone, you can't knock a gov't for trying man.
    This post made while intoxicated so no spell cheakers please :-)
  • Sorry, I have just heard enough of those stupid Canadian dollar jokes to last a lifetime.
  • There is a reason that no broadband company would bother with equiping the area with broadband, they'd almost certainly lose lots of money off of it...

    well duh if the private companies wont do it is then the governements job to provide it for the people

    The telephone company (which had been owned by the government until then) in Puerto Rico was sold to GTE a few years ago. One of the main debates was that since about 75% of the population lives in San Juan and its sorrounding towns (about 24% lives on some smaller cities in the south) people up in the rural areas would get shafted on phone service because there is no way GTE could make money on it. They could now becuse the governement had spent all the money to set up the lines but upkeep would be to costly so slowly they would see their rates go up or their phone service disappear. So in some instances i guess it is cool for the rest of us to pay for stuff so that some people dont have to live in the dark ages :)

  • Re:What a waste... (Score:5)

    by dbarclay10 ( 70443 ) on Friday November 03, 2000 @09:33PM (#650045)
    I agree with you on a few points, but only in a limited way.

    You see, I don't look at this as givine 'net connections to a bunch of people who will never use them.

    This about when rural areas first got paved roads. I doubt many people had cars(after all, there were no roads, so no cars), and yet it made a profound difference not only in their communities, but to the nation as a whole(not that I'm saying good changes, by the way). All of a sudden, a farmer could feed more than people within 20km of his house - he could feed people 200-300kms away!

    There's also a few things you may not realize.

    a) Farming is actually an incredibly technical occupation. The amounts of data that a farmer generates in one year is probably more than an an average two-three story office building.
    b) There isn't much to do out in the boonies. While farmers usually enjoy their work, their kids might not. This will immediately increase their quality of living. Also, the two absolutely brilliant people I met became brilliant studying on the farm they grew up on - their was nothing else to do.

    Dave
    'Round the firewall,
    Out the modem,
    Through the router,
    Down the wire,
  • The US government didn't do this on such a wide scale, but they do give schools big rebates on internet access.

    And then they got this idea that they could make the rebates conditional on use of porn filters (bill [68k.org] currently pending in the house). Apparently, if the government takes your money and then gives it back to you, that gives them permission to control the way you use the money. (okay, that's a big simplification, but it's somewhat true. The struggle is really between federal and local control, and their blind insistence that filters work)
    --

  • Ugh, I apologize for the spelling and bad grammar. It's rather late here.

    Dave
    'Round the firewall,
    Out the modem,
    Through the router,
    Down the wire,
  • I got mine from the government of alberta 1999 census numbers.
  • I don't remember denying that the federal program existed just that it doesn't appear to be directly related to Alberta's Supernet project. No conspiracy just different, related programs.

    Provincial gov'ts are not federal ministries.

  • Re:God bless socialism. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    These are for single income homes--2 income houses have better rates US Federal Tax Rate
    $0-$25,350 15.0%
    $25,350-$61,400 28.0%
    $61,400-$128,100 31.0%
    $128,100-$278,450 36.0%
    Over $278,450 39.6%
    you decide which one sounds better.....
  • You forget that Red Deer, Lethbridge, and other "smaller" cities aren't included in that 1.8M figure, and they already have broadband. If you did your research, you'd realize that the plan is for towns with 10000 people or less. How many of those are there? And I know farmers can use the internet, but they don't need broadband. They already have dialup access. MOST people don't need broadband...
  • Quite the opposite... Calgary is very white-collar, due to the oil business.
  • I live in Ottawa, Canada and I subscribe to Bell Canada High Speed Edition. For $30 dollars a month (I bought the modem, $40 if you don't) you can get 1 megabit per second DSL. The transfer rates seem to top out at about 600k most of the time but I live pretty far from the switch. I chose this over cable modem which is also availible to me. Recently a microwave company has come on line promising 3 megs for $40 dollars a month and another DSL company is offering 2.2 megs but it is pretty expensive. All I can say is I have more choices when in comes to high speed internet than I know what to do with and I live in Canada.

    So much for those Canada jokes, eh

  • janurary 25th, 2004: [idiot, big city, australia] Wow, i really love this 100mb link streight to my house that i got installed yesterday. I also love how i share a 128k pipe with the rest of the criminals who live on this god forsaken island as the only link to the rest of the world!

  • From what I've seen every day stuff costs pretty much the same in Canada as the US, so it's not valid to say $1 US = $1 CAN - you DO have to take the exchange rate into account. That $40 US sweater will cost you $40 US ($60 CAN) in Canada.

    Housing costs do seem to be generally cheaper in Canada, as does auto insurance (presumably because you don't sue each other all the time like the dickheads here do), but I still don't think that a 2/3 salary ($70-80K CAN vs $70-80K US) is going to give you have quite the same comfort of lifestyle.
  • I think you misunderstood. Farmers generally don't need broadband, they already have internet access with dialup modems. They can do all of the above mentioned things with a dialup, can't they?
  • If we re-elect the Liberal Party they have promised to do this for the whole country. Any Canadians will cringe when they hear that it is written in the third red book but hey, its a nice dream.
  • If you didn't pay income tax in 1999, you could go to the Alberta Gov't website, fill in a form, then they send you a Tax Rebate form, you fill it out, then send it in. Pay more attention to the news. :P I didn't pay income tax in 1999, yet I'm getting the money because I followed instructions posted in the newspaper. It is everyone over 16 that gets it, regardless if you paid or not.
  • There's about 3 posts in various ends of the thread that deal with the differences in US/Canada salaries and currency. Here's my response on the subject.

    The US dollar (worth about 50% more than the Canadian one) is definitly a plus, but not as big as one as you'd think. In my experience, cost-of-living is generally higher in the US, especially when it comes to rent (by far my biggest expenditure). Something that costs $20 in USD often costs $20 CD as well, erasing a lot of the currency differences. Of course, this depends a lot on where you live, and things imported from other countries may not follow this rule. Your results may very. :-)

    Where the currency difference helps a LOT is when you send US$ back to Canada, as I am doing making student loan payments... HUGE help there.

    The salary difference is a much bigger story. American companies trip all over themselves giving skilled Canadians fat paychecks, and often stock. Canadians in the US tend to be well-educated, hard-working, and have good attitudes (all the benefits of foreign labor without the "disadvantages" of foreign languages, sad but true). If you can perform a task, they'll pay for it. In contrast, a lot of the companies in Canada tie their payscales to "experience" (number of years worked). If you're new to the industry, expect to be making a lot less compared to your American counterparts. This is starting to change somewhat, but it's still prevalent.

    This means that for a young recent grad like myself, the US is a much better place to work in, financially speaking. As my student loans shrink with the weak C$ and my number of years of experience in the industry increase, the option of coming back to Canada to work looks ever more attractive. I'll have to take a pay cut when I come back, but I'll live with it. :-)

  • Just wanted to add something to this news post. Alberta is not the only province that is aiming for widespread broadband. In a news conferance with Prime Minister Jean Cretien recently, he stated that he wants most, if not all, of the country to have access to broadband connections. Now, obviously this is a campaign promise, which means nothing when the 26/27 November election is over. Anyway, just wanted to inform you all of this. Frax
  • The government isn't getting the revenues all to themselves. The Gov't is paying for the network to be laid, at which point Bell takes over and makes the money.

    The government thinks it's a necessity for everyone in Alberta to have broadband access, so they're paying to have the entire province wired with it. They don't plan to make money off of it.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Ok, fair enough... we don't get any Alberta headlines here in the US
  • The australian Govemernt can do something like this aswell... nahh, theyd want to sell it of first
  • Sound like you have Shaw@home. My Shaw cable connection was just horrible. A friend who has it said it seems to be getting worse. Switching to xDSL was a great move for me. No more high ping times.
  • This about when rural areas first got paved roads. I doubt many people had cars(after all, there were no roads, so no cars), and yet it made a profound difference not only in their communities, but to the nation as a whole(not that I'm saying good changes, by the way). All of a sudden, a farmer could feed more than people within 20km of his house - he could feed people 200-300kms away!
    Road technology doesn't change, though. 10 years from now, the "broadband" network they're building will be like using a 14.4 today.

  • Heh, nope, TELUS didn't get the deal, Bell did. So now we get to get screwed over by a whole new phone company.

    It's not that TELUS sucks, (that goes without saying), but it's that they suck hard enough to leave a technical vacuum any place they touch, that's the real kicker.

  • Well that was part of the merger with bct (bc's former telephone monopoly). They have recently moved large sections back to Calgary and Edmonton.
  • Yeah, this is obviously a bad example. But compare prices in areas of similar population density and per-capita income in the US and Canada.
  • Hehehe :) You're right - the system will have to be replace piece by piece over time. They do that with roads now, though. And it's EXPENSIVE.

    I'd argue that it will be cheaper with this "broadband network" than with roads. After all, we'll probably be using fiber for a long time to come, and it hasn't changes much since its inception. That's what's really driving the cost of this network up - laying the fiber.

    After the fiber is laid, the rest of the costs are more reasonable. And, assuming the fiber holds out, to upgrade the network you only have to upgrade the nodes/towns that need it. The hardware won't be too expensive either, I bet.

    Dave
    'Round the firewall,
    Out the modem,
    Through the router,
    Down the wire,
  • Oh my GOD! Imagine! Being paid for how good you are at your job and for how much you know, rather than how desperate for anyone the company was when they hired you! Canadians are savages, I tell you!

    My point exactly. In Canada, a lot of companies will hire anyone with X years of experience (X depends on what the company believes is appropriate), rather than someone with Y skills. In the US, the situation is reversed. Good or bad, the situation makes working in the US a much more attractive for newcomers to the industry; hence the "brain drain" that's happening now in Canada.

    In my "experience", the number of years someone has in the industry, while somewhat valueable, is not the best indicator of how any given employee will perform. Any company that uses it as their primary (if not only) criteria for hiring is doing themselves a disservice.

  • You mean these numbers on the Alberta Government's homepage [gov.ab.ca] that say the rural population is only 500,000? (Scroll down to the 'Alberta Facts' box).
  • I'm also from Saskatoon. Apparently, Sasktel is one of the major Telcos in the world. Amazing, since we are the 3rd smallest province in population (PEI is first, Newfieland is second)

    My family has had ADSL since 1996. I suppose it helps when you live only a few blocks from their downtown office :) And it's amazing, if somebody wants something huge (StarOffice), it's not unreasonable to expect them to have broadband internet and to download it for themselves. Then there is the States where 1/1000 people have highspeed :) There are cities there with populations which are like 10 times the size of our Province!

  • This is just another example of how Canadian technology infrastructure is ahead of the rest of the world. I have been living in Alberta for the last four years and have had cable internet access for the last two, always at a flat $40 per month.

    Just look at banking technology. I can go anywhere in canada and never carry cash, making purchases directly from stores using my bank card.
    The wonders of Interac and a standardized system. I am not even sure if America has heard of Interac, I know you have ATMs, but that is about it.
  • Yes, but I've never been one to let popular ignorance supercede my own intelligence :)

    Besides, the Network+ and CCNA cert exams still use broadband and baseband as shown above. CompTIA and Cisco certifications are industry standard. Media buzzwords are not.

    Besides, "Broadband", as used by most providers, is correct.

  • The election in Canada is federal, but this program is being set up by the provincial government. There is no involvement with the federal election.
  • "My views, not the Company's, blah - blah": Newbies, Instant Feedback, and Results I'm the Online Director of the Calgary Herald, and I was involved in the roll-out of DSL in Calgary a few years back just as North America was getting a whiff of it. (Leggo my Ego, I'm just stating I'm in a position to comment on this.) What are we shooting for with the Web? Where are you applying your talents? The Internet is not an elitest secret. Everyone here knows low ping is inversely related to frags... but what does it MEAN? Comments have flown along the lines of, "What a waste." Wow. Not to be flippant, but, What are you doing here? Is it not Insanely Great (TM) that we can even have this discourse? Would you bother at 300 bps? I meant, "Think about what's happening here". If Mister Alberta Farmer does a cost/benefit analysis of taking the time to look up some Euchre tips on his box (M$, *nix, Orange - whatEVER) and impresses/enlightens everyone at Saturday nite cards... ... you know where I'm going. Anyone who's tasted broadband could write a book about it. Web infrastrucure's value goes deeper than building a road. R.
  • No, I mean the 1999 census numbers [gov.ab.ca] The 2000 numbers are there too, I don't know why I missed them. Anyhow, if you look at these numbers, the 14 cities of Alberta make up 1.8 million people. The rest of the population live in or near small towns, and those are the communities that this supernet is being connected too, so those are the people who we have to consider in figuring out who's getting this service.
  • Well, if you work there, you probably noticed the huge exodus of IT staff? The fact that they cut the wages of their tech support staff to near half? As I do consulting, I have already noticed the drop in ADSL tech support. Before they were smart, educated people, but now, I expect to hear "do you want fries with that" at the end of my call... At least this is true for the Telus offices in Edmonton, people are leaving like rats from a sinking ship. (3 personal friends and about 5 aquaintances so far have done so.)

    Bork!
  • Not so likely.
    It's ALBERTA thats footing the bill.
    And sence our surplus is only a few
    billion dollars I think its justified.

    Now all they need to do is spend the rest
    on education and healthcare.

    --
  • That was a poorly researched /. response.
    The program announced in the story is a provincial intiative for rural Alberta and, ASFAIK, not part of the Federal programs you mention. A look through the Alberta government Supernet Site [gov.ab.ca] does not reveal any connection to the Canarie [canarie.ca] project. This one is an all Alberta project using Alberta seed money.

    FWIW, the Liberal Red Book III still contains unfullfilled promises from 1993's Red Book I. I don't put a lot faith that anything in the book will actually become policy.
  • Yes.. I do work at Telus.. edmonton definately had problems.. they've managed to work past them, but unfortunately it was only after alot of good people left. I know, because our dept took a few of them. BC ADSL support is still top notch.. our level 1 is outsourced to a company in Nova Scotia. "OLS". The real problem is not pay it's jsut the environment.. here in BC alot of our systems teams have jumped ship looking for better work.. taking pay cuts to work at places they think would be funner.. such as 360 networks, roundheaven etc.. we're losing alot of good people higher up the chain as well.

    ----------------------------
  • This isn't terribly surprising. The entire province has been wired with fiber optics for almost 20 years now. I'm more suprised that it took this long to figure out that those nifty little fibers can carry more than just voice.
  • Wow, no provincial income tax? I hadn't heard about this one. I'm a Canadian (who lived in Calgary for 3 years) working as a software engineer in the US right now. Day by day I'm seeing the financial advantages of working in the US disappear... health costs are lower, sales taxes (in AB) are comparable, and now with the federal income tax cut, the fed income tax brackets are very close too. I should probably start thinking about moving back.

    Of course, the weather in AB blows, but then the personality of the people here almost offsets that. :-)

  • why don't farmers need broadband?

    Using your argument you don't need broadband
    either, and neither do I (but it sure is better
    than my awesome .5k throughput from my previous
    ISP).
  • VOTE LIBERAL!

    Why? So Cretin[1] and his cronies can spend another four years doing absolutely nothing?!? Maybe they can find more protesters to pepper spray in the next term. I seem to remember the statement "I will get rid of da GST". Well, I'm still waiting. Real tax cuts are needed. Good old Cretin did announce some just before the election. Then he dissolved parliment for the election, so the tax cuts are not law yet they are nothing more than a promise. Are you actually naive enough to believe that this asshole will follow through on this promise?

    We need a change. Even Joe Who would be a better choice (not voting for him either).

    1. Yes, I know I misspelled his name.
  • Yes it is!! I pay $40 CDN in Winnipeg for @home and see that it is $40 USD in Mobile Al when I visited friends and worried about getting a gun stuck in my face again. Less Guns and cheaper broadband. I am working on permanent residency in Canada. And the easiest way to get into Canada is via L'arche on an A20 visa. Even easier than for programming. Shalom, Mark RRR
  • You can't buy a product that doesn't exist and given the cost of laying fibre across the province (Americans, check a map and note just how much land area Alberta covers, then note there are only 3 million people in the province and 2/3 of those live in the two major cities and the corridor between them) the Telcos aren't interested in doing it without a major investor. The Alberta government has decided to play the role of investor.

    When comes down to it, this program is very NOT socialist. No private corporations will be harmed and the final product will be privately owned. The government is just a customer who wants high speed access to its offices across the province and has $200 million to drop on it.

    But if you want a big fat pipe now and your just an ordinary consumer in rural Alberta you'll have to move to the city where we've had broadband for 4 years.
  • I don't doubt that there is better care in a major trauma center in Calgary, but if the network brings improvements to the rural hospitals, it can't be all that bad.
    ---

  • Oh, here another little thing. (Score:3)

    by dbarclay10 ( 70443 ) on Friday November 03, 2000 @10:13PM (#650097)
    Population of Alberta: ~2,700,000
    Population of Rural Alberta: ~540,000
    Population of Urban Alberta: ~2,160,000

    We can probably except that %25 percent of Alberta's population will subscribe to the service(a large porton of rural areas, as well as a smaller portion of urban areas).

    So, we've got 25% of Alberta's population(25% = 675,000 people).

    675,000 * $40/month = $27,000,000 a MONTH.

    So, how long do you think it'll take them to make up the $300,000,000 initial investment? Seems like a damned fine setup to me.

    Dave
    'Round the firewall,
    Out the modem,
    Through the router,
    Down the wire,
  • I'm just trying to sell T-shirts here.

    It doesn't pay to check facts when you want a +5 funny! The moderators don't read the article, so why should I?

    Now, go buy a "What Would Jeebus Do?" mousepad, to compensate for interfering with my tasteless, yet ineffective commercial exploitation of slashdot.

    (Anyway, Alberta's the "freak province" with heavily taxed oil wealth; if prices went up much more, they could put every legal citizen in the whole province on welfare and break even by taxing foreign oil extractors. It's to Canada as Canada is to the world: a huge bundle of natural resource wealth with a tiny population that can get away with practically any ridiculous economic policy by just selling off those resources in raw form to foreigners. We're the feudal nobility of the world, living high by taking a share of the profits from any use of the land, which is conveniently defended for us by our friendly, uncovetous neighbor, the world's greatest military power, which has it's own racket. Which, incidentally, is why you need a Jeebus coffee mug and a matching Jeebus sweater; welfare doesn't include GHz processors and cable modems yet.)

    --------
  • This type of thing IS happening in the US, but only on the level of local governments. For example, in Tacoma, WA, the city got fed up waiting for TCI / AT&T / whatever they are these days to get their act together. The city went ahead and wired its own cable network. Result? Excellent broadband service, without the moronic @home hassles, and only 20 bucks a month. In fact, because of this, AT&T had to reduce their rates in this area or face losing a crapload of customers.

    Contrast that with, say Redmond, where there is DSL, but no cable available. No competition. The price is -at least- 40 a month, and that's for bare bones service.

    The downside, is that wiring an entire city is a pretty massive undertaking if you aren't building on existing infrastructure. For one the size of Tacoma, it is feasible with a couple years of work. For one like, say, Los Angeles, it would be a nightmare. And to expand such a proposition to the national level -- well, it ain't gonna happen.

    Don't forget, the cost of wiring isn't just the cables and power. You have to deal with buildings (high-rises are probably even worse). You have to tear up roads and do things that may affect traffic. And while you're at it, make sure you don't affect any other service. Very costly.

    Frankly, if you want broadband NOW, you should just move to a new residence. If you're looking for the better long term solution, then who knows - maybe they'll do something like Tacoma did. If you live in a small-medium sized town with a lot of tech professionals, you might be able to get some petitions and influence the local govt. A long shot, of course, but an interesting prospect.

    Best regards,

    SEAL
  • As an Albertan i was a little worried when i first saw this a while ago. In the last big oil boom, a former premier, peter lougheed, billions of dollars on infrastructure projects such as attempting to pave every grid road in the province(i think thats one per mile or km, over a large province). This put the province into a debt that is still with us. As i have thought of this, it occurs to me that this will not happen. The current government as almost compeletly paid off the total debt, and would never, no matter how dumb you may think they are, do something as hypocritical as starting a new debt in a time of prosparity.
  • I've seen the jokeish pile of shit cable modem service that is available to me here in British Columbia for $40. The service is horrible- they told me they support my connect- as long as they can "ping my modem", they are satisfied and 100% supported, the tech people clueless (Tier 1 does not know the difference between TCP and ICMP) and the bandwidth cap intolerable.

    So, this is what I get for fourty dollars a month Canadian? I'd pay triple that for good service, a consistent connect to Quake servers, and the ability to talk to someone who knows networking when I phone tech support.

    One of the most killer moments was when I complained to the tech support guys about the crappy connects I got in Quake, to the tune of five or six packet loss phone jack icons a minute (yes, I troubleshooted every last variable other than my cable modem) and in order to get me off the phone, they told me to take a screenshot of the lag, and to send it to support@home.com. So, I took a picture of the game not moving.

    ..

    Michael Labbe
  • Cable modem service (Shaw @Home or Videon @Home) or xDSL is available in Alberta in these places:

    Calgary (including suburbs)
    Edmonton (including suburbs)
    Red Deer (including suburbs)
    Lethbridge
    Fort McMurray
    Hinton

    Population is about 3 million, and the cities above comprise about 80%. So add the other 400 000 in that this story is about, and you'd be pretty hard pressed to find a place without good net access.

    --
  • Once the fiber is in, $40 should do it fine. $40 already is the normal fee in the cities in Alberta for cable or ADSL.

    --
  • Isn't there still a large salary difference between what a software engineer can make in the US vs Canada? With a bit of experience it's very easy to make $70-80K+ in the US, or a lot more if you're a contracter. How easy would it be to make the same (say $120K CAN) in Canada? I'm not talking top salaries, but rather what a typical experienced guy can expect...

    Agreed, there may be other advantages to living in Canada, but financially it seems a loss.

  • Mind you, "one of the best systems in the world" doesn't mean "best possible system". All rich countries have extremely regulated healthcare, so there are no real-world examples to contrast with.

    For example, the American system isn't actually any better just because they pretend it's a free market, it's so absurdly overregulated that there's no room for profitable price reduction (however they reduce quality of service with profitable spending reduction), and the "insurance" system is practically equivalent to a tax-supported system (hired central management isn't any smarter than elected central management). But they at least let the extremely rich pay for operations that are too expensive for the general population. These early adopters fund a lot of research and development.

    We don't give enough credit for the progress of medicine to developments in the USA. It scares me to think that they might be adopting something like our system soon, as it could really hurt the whole world's hospitals. What would MRI prices be without those crazy rich Yankees having their pets scanned?

    What really bugs me is all the talk about how we mustn't allow private hospitals and "two-tier health care". It's not like people who can afford private health care can't afford plane tickets! They just go to other countries (mostly the USA) when they want treatment that the government won't pay for. What would be so wrong about letting them do it here, and keep their money in the country?

    --------
  • Alberta does have a sales tax, it's just hidden.

    Idiots that want to grouse about health care -- and that'd be Canadian idiots thinking it's awful and expensive, or American idiots thinking the same -- need to check out Canada's Burning [washingtonmonthly.com], which exposes the lies the media tells. Canada's healthcare is currently kicking righteous ass, despite its problems.


    --
  • Ok, we also have 2.2 million people, and the two most important cities in Canada outside of Toronto and Vancouver. The primary industries have not been our most important for some time now.

    Good look with the t-shirts though

  • TECHNICAL FARMING (Score:4)

    by FFFish ( 7567 ) on Saturday November 04, 2000 @06:45AM (#650143) Homepage
    Farming is an extremely high-tech business these days. Check out Trimble [trimble.com], the first site in a Google search for "farming GPS."

    Farmers are using sophisticated soil-sampling quality testing, with GPS, to determine fertilizer spreads. The GPS is used to mark the sample location and generate a "map" of the field... and the GPS is used to control the mix of fertilizer *as* it is being spread.

    GPS is also used for yield monitoring, during harvest: volume and moisture content. Why is one area more productive than another? The soil/fertilizer/weather/etc data is reviewed and analysed, and plans made to improve yield the following year.

    Some farms use GPS with insect infestation data to perform variable crop spraying. The most sophisticated systems mix the pesticide on-the-wing: concentration dependent on infestation level.

    How about variable-rate planting? Overcrowding is ruinous in poor-yielding sections. Plant fewer seeds there, and save money. Variable-depth tilling: monitor the hardpan depth and till only deep enough to crack it.

    Variable-rate irrigation will make a fortune for its inventor, particularly in water-poor states like California.

    And so on. The farming business is as high-tech as one's imagination... satellite imagery mapping out stressed crops, so one doesn't need to sample all 4000 acres to locate the infestations? Why not!



    --
  • The provincial Tories put this through, as far as I'm concerned, the only worthwhile government in this country. Finally a gov't with enough gonads to do something the people want, and in doing so set themselves up for flak from all those losers that have nothing better to do than complain.

  • dubbed the Alberta SUPERNET, Minister of Science and Innovation Lorne Taylor said the system will "provide high speed"...

    Lorne Taylor? I thought that was Al Gore's title.

    These comis are never tired of putting forth this transparent propaganda machine about how the government did this.. the government did that..

    Get real man. The internet was invented by General Motors and Standard Oil, and no high speed venture will succeed unless they appoint Chainsaw Al to run it.

  • Re:No sales tax in Alberta (Score:3)

    by FFFish ( 7567 ) on Saturday November 04, 2000 @06:49AM (#650167) Homepage
    You don't need to make $120K in Canada. You need to make $70-80K in Canada.

    Things don't automatically cost 50% more just because they're sold in Canada.

    It certainly isn't a financial loss of any calibre once one calculates in the costs of being in America.

    --
  • Just to clarify some of the points that people have been dancing around here:

    1) In an area (x) times the size of Texas, we have
    slightly less than three million people.
    2) MOST of those people (~75%?) already have access to high speed internet connections, via ADSL or cable. (or if they're willing to pay, direct fibre connection to the CA*Net backbone)
    3) This news is only interesting because it's getting high speed access to everyone else in the province. All of those people in Balzac, Beiseiker, and so on will have high speed when this is through.

    That said, this is just another one of our Premier's pre-campaign sweeteners. Somehow throwing $300M at a company to do something they'd make money on anyways doesn't exactly go along with the philosophy of Mr. "cut government spending, privatise everything, and get me another %$$#& beer!" but it _does_ go along nicely with the idea of softening up the voters before officially calling an election. (especially when his strongest support has been rural)


  • Why doesn't the US take an intiative like this? (Score:3)

    by Gendou ( 234091 ) on Friday November 03, 2000 @09:10PM (#650177) Homepage
    What gives? The US should also be making moves like this to ensure broadband to the masses. It will inevitably be vital to not only the advancement of, but the maintenance of our society.

    It's not as if we don't have the funds for such an endeavor. A friend of mind crunched the numbers and figured that the cost of one aircraft carrier could put a computer on ever classroom desk of every school of every town, city, and state in this country (and we're in the processes of building a new one right now, right?).

    Wiring the country for government subsidized broadband would be a lot cheaper than the aforementioned task. Grr...

    Maybe I'm just bitter because my house sits in the middle of a DSLAM-lacking bubble.

  • And soon, no provincial income tax, either...that leaves us with about a 37% federal income tax (depending on your tax bracket) and 7% GST on all non-essential purchases. Granted, it's more tax than neccessary (thanks to a huge national debt) but it's relatively liveable.

  • smart Canadians knew about this long ago....... (Score:4)

    by CanadaMan ( 121016 ) on Friday November 03, 2000 @11:10PM (#650185)
    This is a poorly researched /. story. It is, in fact, the entire country of Canada which is gaining a national fibre-optic network. information can be had here [canarie.ca]. If you read the site thouroughly, including the various white papers, you will see that the Canadian government has invested a large amount of money in the project. The aim is to create a national network by 2004. It's also a plan that Jean Chretien and Liberals are including as part of their platform in the upcoming election. Evidence can be found in what the Grits call Red Book III.
  • Road technology doesn't change, though. 10 years from now, the "broadband" network they're building will be like using a 14.4 today.

    True... engineering technologies are exactly the same today as they were ten or twenty years ago. And roads don't need regular maintenance.... oh wait, no, never mind.

    At least we've replaced all those old copper lines we used to have ten years ago, back when 28.8 seemed like a lot... oh wait, forget it.

    :)

  • its so cute when Americans make broad, uninformed generalisations. Alberta has no sales tax. None. There is a 7% federal sales tax though, which has a variety of exempted goods, and a rebate program for low-income families (kind of a roundabout way to do it. I don't like sales taxes at all) The federal tax brackets are: 17%, 25% (over $30K), 29% (over$60K). Alberta takes an amount equal to 44% of your federal taxes. Thus, combined, 24.48%, 36%, 41.76%. All assuming no deductions of any kind, of course. I've tried finding the equivalent information on the irs site, but can't seem to find any information; what are US federal tax brackets? I remember hearing that your tax levels aren't much different from ours, you just spend all of yours on guns and bombs... Go check out http://www.ccra-adrc.gc.ca/tax/ for actual facts before blithering about other nations tax systems.

  • Comment removed (Score:4)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday November 04, 2000 @01:28AM (#650193)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • mmm, cause there's only so many doctors and nurses to go around?

    Bzzt, wrong. Check the facts. The issue is that doctors can't get time in the facilities. Private facilities would increase the number of possible physician hours worked, and thus improve public health care.

    'cause private facilities duplicate existing resources

    Yeah, and we only need one brand of cornflakes too, and one car maker, and one computer maker too. Are there really people still so stupid they spout USSR propaganda like this with a straight face?

    Business can thrive on one percent or less profit, despite what drug companies claim. Look at grocery retailers for an example.

    Ah. Ignorant, stupid, and economically illiterate to boot (hint: It's TURNOVER that matters. Read an econ textbook, loser). A totally typical advocate of socialized health care. Thanks for playing -- come back when you grow a brain.
  • I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure fiber could be considered broadband, depending on how its used.

    AFAIK:

    Broadband:
    - Uses many signals over a single pipe to carry data.
    Baseband:
    - Uses a single signal to carry data over a pipe.

    Now, if they use multiple colors of light for the transmission of data over the actual line, wouldn't that be true broadband?

    Please correct me if I am wrong here.

  • But you can't run fiber to a helicopter!

    Sure you can.

    You just can't fly it very far...
  • Well, like all things the government does, there are tradeoffs :)

    Why don't more private companies build highways in Canada? They're allowed to, I've checked it out and talked with a few high-ish ranking politicians and lawyers. Fact is, there isn't enough money to be made. People prefer medicore, traffic-laden yet FREE roads over nice and expensive ones.

    I think the same might happen here - people will prefer the lowish-cost government internet access over more expensive commercial counterparts.

    However, I also doubt that there will be no commercial competition. After all, this is one of the first government ISPs(here in Canada, anyways), and there are how many commerical ones? :) Hey, I'm on DSL right now(which is probably what the government is putting in), but I'd pay for cable if I could get it. The population density in my area is low enough that I'd probably *never* have speeds below DSL, but I'd often have speeds far surpassing it.

    Dave
    'Round the firewall,
    Out the modem,
    Through the router,
    Down the wire,
  • Are you telling me that operating expenses even approach the tens of millions of dollars in revenue they'd be making? :)

    Keep in mind I'm not trying to say that this is perfect, I'm just trying to dispel the "they're wasing our tax money on frivilous technology!" myth.

    I think it's pretty obvious that this will be making money, and lots of it, in not too long a time.

    Dave
    'Round the firewall,
    Out the modem,
    Through the router,
    Down the wire,
  • You have no idea about keysian economics at all.

    Govenrment spends in times of resession to promte growth, and save in times of growth, to maintain control.
  • Oh, they're spending ALL my tax dollars on this optical fibre crap when they could be spending it on HEALTH CARE!!!

    Whine whine whine. Ever cosider the possibility that while you're skiing in Banff and run smack into a tree, fracturing your skull, the local hospital might just benefit from that network, and therefore you might just benefit?

    At the very least, you could play Quake from your hospital bed...
    ---

  • This is great! (Score:3)

    by dbarclay10 ( 70443 ) on Friday November 03, 2000 @09:21PM (#650220)
    I've long felt that governments who could afford it should start treating internet connectivity as another form of infrastructure. Like roads, water supply, and the rest, the internet is probably going to become extremely ubiquitous. Frankly, I don't trust any commercial entity with that sort of responsibility. At least governments can in some ways be held accountable.

    Governments shouldn't have to do things like split big monopolies up - they should never have become monopolies in the first place. With the government hooking up its populace, you know you will always have an alternative. And, if for some reason the entire venture becomes "unprofitable", no politician is going to shut down the program after people have gotten used to it. They'll never work again.

    Dave
    'Round the firewall,
    Out the modem,
    Through the router,
    Down the wire,

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