Trudeau Promises To Connect 98% of Canadians To High-Speed Internet By 2026 (www.cbc.ca) 126
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says its government is now on track to connect 98% of Canadians to high-speed internet by 2026. CBC.ca reports: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and a handful of cabinet ministers held a news conference in Ottawa to launch the $1.75 billion universal broadband fund -- a program unveiled in the federal government's 2019 budget and highlighted on the campaign trail and in September's throne speech. Most of the money was announced in last year's budget. "We were ready to go in March with the new Universal Broadband Fund and then the pandemic hit," Rural Economic Development Minister Maryam Monsef told reporters. The prime minister said the government is now on track to connect 98 per cent of Canadians to high-speed by 2026 -- an increase over the previously promised 95 per cent benchmark -- and to link up the rest by 2030.
About $150 million from the fund will be freed up to fund projects aimed at getting communities connected by next fall. Senior officials with the department of Innovation, Science and Economic Development said applications will be reviewed on an ongoing basis until Jan. 15, 2021, with a goal of having projects completed by mid-November, 2021. Deciding who gets upgraded connectivity first will depend on the service providers applying, they said. The prime minister said the government also has reached a $600 million agreement with Telesat for satellite capacity to improve broadband service in remote areas and in the North.
About $150 million from the fund will be freed up to fund projects aimed at getting communities connected by next fall. Senior officials with the department of Innovation, Science and Economic Development said applications will be reviewed on an ongoing basis until Jan. 15, 2021, with a goal of having projects completed by mid-November, 2021. Deciding who gets upgraded connectivity first will depend on the service providers applying, they said. The prime minister said the government also has reached a $600 million agreement with Telesat for satellite capacity to improve broadband service in remote areas and in the North.
He needs to cut back on the weed (Score:2)
That or catch up on the concepts oh high speed and percentages.
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This is just going to be "give the money to starlink and call it done"
Honestly, as long as it's not Bell, Rogers, Telus, or Shaw operating it, I don't care how it's done.
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Re: He needs to cut back on the weed (Score:2)
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Bell and Telus will just brand Starlink access and add onerous restrictions and a generous helping of lucre for themselves.
*Dusts off hands*
Made in Canada! Canadian content! Rah!
Star Link? (Score:2)
Why not just say 100% and count on Star Link covering every inch of Canada?
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Who says he doesn't plan to use StarLink for that?
I haven't read TFA but I heard that Canada was interested in StarLink. It's a perfect fit for low density population in a geographically big country like Canada. That announcement comes in just days after StarLink beta went live.
Re: Star Link? (Score:2)
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Cable Internet connection: 10-500/5-50 Mb/s [broadbandnow.com].
Starlink: 160/23 Mb/s [forbesimg.com]
Is that comparable or not? To me it seems comparable.
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Canada is not going to get 160 download from Starlink
And why would be that the case?
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Re: Star Link? (Score:2)
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Re: Star Link? (Score:2)
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I know that the cellphone tower around my cottage gives me perfect connection in the winter. However, when everyone drives out there to go to the beach in the summer the whole thing bogs down to totally unusable.
Yeah, now imagine having 14 cellphone towers in the same area, with different towers serving different people. Still having a bad connection?
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We're talking about places with no cable internet, just satellite or if lucky, LTE.
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Well where I come from in Canada we are paying ~$60/month for a ~2mbps connection (3G cell) and 5GB/month before we roll into the next tier of payment. There is no prospect for a faster (4G LTE) connection anytime soon and there are no wired connection options available. I would call where I am at rural but I'm sure others would call it remote (though true remote is the far northern parts of Canada). It would be nice if all of Canada had access to unlimited Internet for $60/month but that just isn't the rea
Re: Star Link? (Score:2)
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Yea, they were supposed to replace the copper with fibre where I live. Instead they (Telus) ran the fibre to a new cell tower and sell rural internet over LTE, about $90 for a 250GB quota (now if you sign up, 500GB). It's not bad except in the evenings when it often becomes crap.
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Lucky, I pay about $89.60 a month (including taxes) with a 250GB quota for LTE from Telus. The crap internet router thingy also cost $300 (they sell it for $60 if you only use it for home phone now). No dish or booster needed for cell reception as the tower is perhaps 6 miles away.
Re:Star Link? (Score:5, Interesting)
Because SpaceX does not donate to his political campaigns. Telesat Canada's ONLY political donations over the past 20 years have been to the Liberal party. In Canada if you want to win a federal election, you need to win in Quebec (they have almost 25% of the seats in parliament), and the Liberals graft generously in the province.
On top of that if the Canadian Federal Government contracted an American firm for broadband access the media would NEVER stop talking about it. You have to understand how sleepy Canada is. Not long ago a Conservative MP falsified his travel expenses to the tune of $90k ($50k USD) -- claiming it was a mistake and paying it back as soon as he was caught. Canadians were still hearing about this "scandal" TWO YEARS LATER.
Canadians are "nice" (in a passive aggressive way). But don't be fooled. It's political as hell. Skewering politicians is a national sport there.
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Probably not a good idea to put your country's critical infrastructure in the hands of a foreign company run by a guy who keeps failing to deliver on his promises and getting in trouble with the SEC.
They could launch their own but just biting the bullet and laying fibre is the best option. Plenty of bandwidth for today and for the future. Replace the old copper lines. Do it once and you are set for another 100 years at least. 5 year budgets are the real issue.
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We're talking about places where copper line was never put in and often there aren't even roads.
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So how are they planning to get them 50mbit broadband?
Wireless? If they can't easily run cable then wireless is probably not going to be easy or reliable either.
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So how are they planning to get them 50mbit broadband?
Wireless? If they can't easily run cable then wireless is probably not going to be easy or reliable either.
Wireless isn't so hard. You put up some towers with WiMax radios to serve each community, with microwave relays for backhaul. They're pretty reliable. I've been on that sort of system for most of a decade now, except that I switched to having my own dedicated microwave relay and guaranteed backhaul bandwidth, not for reasons of technology but because the provider oversubscribes their WiMax by too large a margin.
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Combination of fibre, satellite and LTE? Telus claims close 50MBs over LTE and it is what they did for me, fibre to the cell tower then LTE for the last half a dozen or so miles with the government picking up a lot of the price for the tower. Though I'm lucky to get 20Mbps down as I'm in kind of a hollow.
Besides, last I looked, the 50Mbps was only for the south with 25 Mbps for the north.
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There are places a lot less remote that still only have access to crappy 3G cell based Internet. We have a fibre line running down the highway near us but still don't have access to even DSL since Bell has no incentive to spend any money to upgrade there equipment here. Sure there are places that don't even have copper lines but how would that stop money being spent to upgrade the old copper systems to fibre where the copper already exists (and the fibre backbone is already in place).
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Because "The prime minister said the government also has reached a $600 million agreement with Telesat for satellite capacity to improve broadband service in remote areas and in the North.", that's why.
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I'll bet an old toonie that Telesat will turn around and subcontract with Star Link...
Cool. (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah - he might not make that number - but by trying and being willing to put shared resources towards a legitimate shared needs - he's doing a much better job than most who never even try at this scale.
It definitely opens up a lot more positive possibilities for the future than what we've been living with here in the USA for the past few years.
I hope we get more young liberal leaders soon taking up positions our old conservative ones have been ignoring for decades.
Biden's cool and all for who he was electe
You're planning on completely replacing all roads? (Score:3)
> you can afford to lay conduit and a fibre optic line at the same time. That road costs way more than the fibre cable in a conduit, that is the reality
You're planning on removing and completely replacing all roads in the whole country this year, especially all of the "proper compacted dirt roads"?
You said "if you can afford" to do that. Well, no we can't afford to build 100 years worth of road network in the next few years. There's a reason it took us over 100 years to build the roads.
By the way, laying
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it costs about $3,354 per tax-paying family
To be honest, a one-time payment of $3500 feels like a pretty good deal if it means that me and every single one of my fellow citizens now has access to fiber broadband.
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I hear ya there. Some people probably would be happy to $3,354 up front in order to have the ability to buy high speed internet for $70/month.
Other people probably have other things that are more important to them. Like replacing their car that broke down. Or indeed just eating and paying the rent/mortgage since their business is mostly shut down from covid.
Are you ready and willing to force everyone else to fork over $3,354 to switch ISPs instead of getting a car that runs?
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a) lots of these places don't have roads to them
b) the ones that do, the road is already down. either you're saying it comes for free when you lay the road (an overstatement to be sure, but in general, sure that's when you'd want to do it) or you're claiming that it's free because there's already a road there. this isn't simcity, dipshit
I have to wonder how much of the 2% (Score:5, Interesting)
Are indigenous/aborignal/natives.
Since most of them live far from the US border where the majority of Canadians live.
Re: I have to wonder how much of the 2% (Score:2)
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Over 2/3 of Canada's population live within 100km of the Canada/US border.
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Obviously you don't realize how big Canada actually is. 8^)
The US/Canadian border is anywhere from ~1800km to ~2500km south of the Arctic Circle.
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One caveat for the above is that Alaska/Canada border was obviously excluded from that statement since part of that border is in the Arctic Circle. ;^)
Re:I have to wonder how much of the 2% (Score:5, Insightful)
So, I've worked on a project in the past to connect first nations communities to the internet. Let me tell you what that problem is.
But first, what there will be no problem for: Capital expenditures. There will always be money to install new hardware. Politicians LOVE capex. They have a physical item that they can point to and then say, "See! This is what we did!" while their voting base drools out of the sides of their mouths.
What there won't be money for: Operational Expenditures. They'll fund the operation for a short, fixed period of time. And then, when that's over, those communities will be expected to pick up the bill. Well, guess what. They rarely, if ever, do. The operations will shut down due to lack of funding, services cut off, and they'll be back the way they started.
This project will happen the exact same way. There will be money to build it. There will be money to fund it for a short period of time. People will use it because its free or subsidized. But when the funding stops a lot of users will just let it go. They'll determine that they don't really need it or they just don't want to pay for it.
And you'll have the end of yet another federally funded political project. It'll die off and the next politician will come in and make a grandiose pronouncement to do the exact same thing that the last guy did, but this time it'll succeed! Yeah, right.
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Yeah, I saw a similar documentary on water supply to first nations.
There's been more than enough spent over the years on clean water systems. But not enough on operational. So the systems always fall into disrepair.
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Starlink? (Score:1)
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Seriously, he spends that before breakfast. The only restraint on his spending now is how long it takes to write press releases.
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Probably there are some national security concerns of putting that kind of power on remove regions in the hands of US based companies. Same reason is used to justify why we don't have cheap cell service or a competitive airline industry...
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Define "high speed" (Score:3, Insightful)
If you define it in 2020, it won't be "high speed" anymore by 2026.
According to people of my grandpa's generation, time was, 300 bps was "high speed."
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If you define it in 2020, it won't be "high speed" anymore by 2026.
According to people of my grandpa's generation, time was, 300 bps was "high speed."
Well - from the article - in 2016 the CRTC defined broadband as a minimum of 50 Mbps down and 10 Mbps up. Which honestly is pretty darned reasonable for home Internet, and will be for the next decade or so.
Yes, yes, I happily moved up to 1G symmetric as soon as it was available, but... my link is idle the vast, vast majority of the time. Are there uses that require more bandwidth? Sure. Would it be nice to download 100G game preloads faster? Sure. But think about the stated goal here: 98% of the na
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I would be more than happy with a 10mbps download speed for an actual wired connection but I'm sure others would find it frustratingly slow. 8^)
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According to people of my grandpa's generation, time was, 300 bps was "high speed."
But is that as relevant? 20 years ago I had 10mbps cable. There are still plenty of people classing that as "broadband".
On that budget, good luck to them (Score:1)
Trudeau Won't Do It .... (Score:2)
But MUSK will. Anybody who can afford $100/month can get StarLink, which gives you pretty good speed and pretty good latency. And the reliability will improve when the constellation of satellites is a little more complete.
Re: Trudeau Won't Do It .... (Score:2)
Fewer than 98%?? (Score:1)
What if fewer than 98% of Canadians want to be connected to High-Speed Internet?
Modern cities, with 2010 speeds (Score:4, Informative)
Starlink will certainly help the connectivity in rural Canada. When it comes to cities we have a company called Bell, which is Canada's equivalent of Comcast, that offers faster speeds, but then won't tell you how you can get fibre to the home, so you are then left with their legacy offering. I am in the country's largest city and I am dealing with speeds that we 'good' 5-10 years ago. Don't get me started on their pricing structure or how they nudge up the price every month >:(
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Their plan is only to offer 50mbps down and 10mbps up. That's not "high speed" and is already inadequate.
With multiple users and more and more basic things like education moving online every country should be looking at rolling out gigabit fibre everywhere. Just get on it with, rip that copper out and replace it. Once it's done you are good for future upgrades too, e.g. Japan's fibre network started at 1000/1000 and is now at 20,000/20,000 just by upgrading the modems on either end.
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Well I'd have the government do it. Borrow the money and then charge ISPs a low fee to access the network, enough to cover the maintenance costs and slowly repay the loan.
Governments can borrow at extremely low rates so it makes sense to do that to build infrastructure than then has payback in terms of increases in general tax take as the economy benefits, as well as being able to charge for access directly in this case.
A private company could do the same thing but it will end up costing more.
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Yes. That works reasonably well in many places. State owned telecom company owns the infrastructure, ISPs buy access, install their own equipment at local hubs or rent it.
In some places the infrastructure owner isn't state owned but is heavily regulated. The UK is kinda like that, the copper lines are owned by OpenReach and ISPs pay them for access, except cable companies who have their own copper. Unfortunately OpenReach is shit and not regulated enough so fibre roll out is very slow.
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Why not use a TPIA provider like Teksavvy?
Teksavvy is not a provider. They are a reseller. I know, I get my cable internet through them. It is Shaw, except I don't have the distaste of paying Shaw.
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I am moving to eBox. I don't get faster, due to infrastructure limitations, but I do get cheaper. If an ISP is increasing costs, while not increasing service, then they don't deserve me as a customer. Bell is a dinosaur, promises a lot and fails to deliver.
Telescreens? (Score:2)
cool.
As a Canadian, let me assure you all... (Score:2)
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In fact, the only thing we have is our own fire department which named after the community
Another deals for big telco (Score:1)
The Onion's Internet Plan (Score:2)
The Onion's plan for universal Internet in the US was for Canada to share their password.
With this development in Canada, the Onion's plan for the US can move forward?
I'll believe it when I stream it! (Score:2)
Trudeau "promises" (Score:2)
https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]. Lies. I don't think he has ever made good on any promise. Just one of the many examples, the electoral reform "promise" he made in 2015, he broke before 2017 even started.
Re: Joe Biden (Score:2, Offtopic)
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NOT my president
Well not for another 2 months, no.
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Can you elaborate? The only people who really dislike him are the conservatives from Alberta who would fit right into Alabama. I mean you see morons up there flying confederate flags.