CRTC should replace 50/10 universal service objective with 1/1 Gbps
The CRTC drop the 50/10 Mbps universal service objective by 2030 as it will systemically entrench unequal access to the Internet for rural and remote communities for decades to come on the basis that many higher income urban neighbourhoods have 1/1 Gbps access today, scalable to 40 Gbps and 100 Gbps in the next few years . Replace the 50/10 Mbps objective with a 1/1 Gbps universal service mandate by 2030 on the basis that this will drive FTTP investment of TSPs in geographic and demographic areas where they would otherwise not invest . CRTC to provide ongoing monitoring and periodic regular reporting of deployments against the universal service mandate, taking into account changes in technology and market conditions, and increase the bandwidth target of the universal service mandate as needed. In addition to mandating a bandwidth objective that the CRTC must also mandate targets for scalability, availability, symmetry, differentiation, latency, jitter and mean-time-to-restore, on the basis that useful connectivity is about more than bandwidth (speed x capacity). As part of this broader service mandate Service Level Agreements (SLAs) will be mandated for all subscribers committing retail TSPs to deliver on advertised performance and providing subscribers remedies for non-performance.
Broadband Internet access is an essential service for residences and businesses in Canada. Unfortunately, there are significant and documented gaps about the accessibility, performance and affordability of Internet access services available to all Canadians for this essential service. This ‘digital divide’ is most evident in lower income urban neighbourhoods and in rural and remote communities is due to under investment in next generation network capacity by incumbent ILECs, who are the dominant service providers, and often the only service provider in these areas.
It is very encouraging, that by defining broadband as a basic service, adopting higher service quality/speed standards, and developing funding mechanisms for addressing the gaps in Canada’s broadband infrastructure in Telecom Regulatory Policy CRTC 2016-496, the Commission has supported efforts by lower levels of government and the telecom service providers (TSPs) to meet growing demand by Canadians for broadband Internet access. In this intervention, it is argued that the Commission and Government of Canada must further refine the basic service definition to be about more than speed of the service only (such as scalability, symmetry, differentiation, Quality of Service -‘QoS’, and latency for example).
But with respect to the bandwidth (bandwidth = speed x capacity) target, that states that all Canadians “should have” access to 50/10 Mbps Internet by 2030 as defined in “Telecom Regulatory Policy CRTC 2016-496;” it is wholly inadequate as a bandwidth target to meet the needs of any and all Canadians that exist today, let alone 10-years from now. Today, many urban Canadian businesses and residents in higher income, more densely populated neighbourhoods are receiving 1/1 Gbps and higher bandwidth, while the CRTC’s “Broadband Fund” and Infrastructure Canada’s CTI programs aim at 50/10 Mbps by 2030.
Moreover, the Commission acknowledges that broadband is a “transformative enabling technology” and concluded that any Canadian without broadband access is profoundly disadvantaged and that the risks of non-action included missed opportunities for innovation, creativity, and engagement; reduced competitiveness; weakened domestic prosperity; and diminished prospects for Canadians.[i] However, by the CRTC setting 50/10 Mbps as universal service objective, they are profoundly limiting any Canadian equal access to the Internet and withholding the transformative benefits that accrue; effectively making the digital divide wider, and with it economic inequality, as many high income Canadians receive 1/1 Gbps today.
FTTP infrastructure future-proofs the users and the government funders from the necessity of continuously having to expend taxpayers’ funds to subsidize TSPs’ future incremental upgrades like it has done for the past 27 years as the CRTC targets have evolved from 1.5 Mbps to 5/1 Mbps to 50/10 Mbps (which deliberately matched ILECs’ ability to deliver the targeted bandwidth by providing marginal upgrades to existing copper/coaxial/fixed wireless facilities, rather setting a target that would induce TSPs to invest in fibre optic facilities). FTTP reduces delays subscribers experience in receiving future bandwidth increases, as it may be increased with command-line changes not requiring TSPs to roll a truck. Conversely, the limited scalability in the 50/10 Mbps upgraded legacy infrastructure translates into rural and low income urban subscribers having to wait for more taxpayer funded subsidies to flow to TSP before the next upgrade required will be made, as has been the history of rural broadband funding programs. Moreover, because the 50/10 connections are shared by users at each node, bandwidth contention means they rarely, if ever, receive advertised bandwidths, particularly at peak times when they need it most. The harmful effects on rural and low-income urban subscribers due to a lack of scalability has been evident to subscribers where upgrades provided in the past ten years often deliver speeds at peak usage times that slower than dial-up. During the Covid 19 outbreak, this peak time performance degradation has become a 9 to 5 problem. “For most rural Canadians, internet service is inadequate at best, but the requirement to work from home, precipitated by COVID-19, shows it is unreasonably inadequate. Even after the pandemic, internet reliance is increasing exponentially. The World Economic Forum predicts more reliance on the internet for economic and social interactions. This situation should be a major wakeup call for all policymakers. Rural and remote communities in Canada are hit hard with inferior internet performance and low data caps. It is an equality issue,” said Michelle Rempel Garner, Shadow Minister for Industry and Economic Development.[ii]
While data on fibre optic deployments is kept secret in Canada, a recent report in the Globe & Mail regarding Cincinnati Bell, chief executive of parent company Brookfield Infrastructure, chief executive Sam Pollock, characterized large investments they have recently made in fibre-optic infrastructure, as having ‘future-proofed’ 50 per cent of its network with more than 17,000 miles of fibre, including the ‘last mile’ lines that go directly to the customer,[iii] which is referenceable to Canada. In an April 2018 press release, Bell announced that they had built, “more than 240,000 total kilometres, Bell's fibre optic network is Canada's largest by far. Across the 4 Atlantic provinces, Québec, Ontario and Manitoba, Bell now serves more than 9.2 million homes and business locations with fibre to the neighbourhood [Fibe or VDSL], and over 3.7 million locations with FTTP connections – a total expected to grow to 4.5 million by the end of this year.”[iv] These FTTP investments future proof Bell, but more importantly, they future proof FTTP subscribers. If these same FTTP investments were made in rural, remote and lower-income urban communities it would future proof them too. This won’t happen as long as the USO and associated funding is aimed at bringing 50/10 Mbps by 2030.
Figure 1 from a recent study published the Fibre Broadband Association by RVA Research shows the rapidly growing speed divide between urban, exurban and rural which is driven by the rapid growth in FTTP deployments in densely populated areas of the US. As Figure 1 shows, urban subscribers enjoy almost 3 times more bandwidth than rural subscribers. Canadians may draw strong parallels from this data as the rural US digital divide is also due to a lack of competitive or regulatory imperative to change the investment strategies of ILECs, just as it is in Canada. One big difference is the public disclosure requirements and transparency required of TSPs in the US is much greater than in Canada which is why this data is available from the US and not from Canada. Concerned citizens should be asking why is this the case and how does this secrecy serve the public interest of taxpayers who are subsidizing these services and ratepayers who are paying for these services? How are Canadians benefiting from regulatory oversight that permits TSPs to keep most of their data secret, so the gaps in coverage and performance are unknowable and service coverage claims of providers not subject to scrutiny? This is particularly galling when one considers the CRTC has a long history of ruling in favour of the ILECs while Canadian taxpayers and ratepayers are subsidizing TSPs to the tune of billions of dollars since deregulation in 1993 and for decades before that when telecom was regulated as the natural monopoly that it is by the CRTC.
Figure 1 Broadband speeds by dwelling density[v]
It is taxpayers and telecom ratepayers (all the same taxpayers) who are subsidizing TSPs to build rural broadband infrastructure. Indeed, rural taxpayers are funding TSPs, usually the ILEC, SILEC or incumbent WISP, to provide 50/10 Mbps Internet service by 2030. And let us not forget that 50/10 Mbps is only a best-effort target for TSPs to hit, there is no mandate compelling them achieve to it and no consequences if they do not. Meanwhile, TSPs, mostly ILECs and incumbent cable companies, are spending billions of dollars building FTTP and LTE connectivity to urban areas. So, in effect, rural taxpayers are transferring their income to TSPs, mostly ILECs and cablecos, to make the digital divide wider today and locking themselves into low bandwidth “good-enough” service for years to come.
In a recent CBC Radio interview, CRTC Chair and CEO Ian Scott, when speaking about inequities in mobile wireless service said, “It's particularly problematic, I think, for Canadians with the lowest incomes. We don't have a 'lifeline' service, a really basic service.” Scott further noted, “That gets more challenging for obvious reasons; if you want a faster, bigger car, sometimes they cost more. But clearly, the objective is to have a wide range of services that meet the needs of all Canadians.” Scott also states, “But I will say, right up front, that rates are higher than many of our major trading partners — and clearly they're too high. Consumers are unhappy.”[vi] Scott could just as easily be speaking about wireline broadband services, which are often overlooked by the media and legislators who are focused on the high cost of wireless service. The same oligopoly that is charging artificially high rates for cell service and providing substandard 3G or less service in rural areas, is providing substandard broadband wireline service to rural households and businesses and charging high rates for that service too. Comparisons by the CRTC clearly show that relative to the cost per Mbps of LTE and FTTP services available in densely populated urban areas is much lower than legacy fixed wireless and copper services in rural areas. [vii]
Scott’s remarks belie more serious concerns that the Chair of the CRTC sees “lifeline service” as the mobile wireless service objective for rural Canadians and compares rural residents need for faster and cheaper wireless access to wanting a “bigger, faster car.” This mindset, that rural citizens should be prepared to accept unequal access to the Internet, is heavily influenced by ILEC lobbying (Scott is an ex-Telus executive) and an urban-centric point of view of the Commission. This results in pressure to keep universal service targets low, to make it easy for ILECs to provide “good-enough” service for rural communities, which has led to the 50/10 Mbps by 2030 universal service objective. This despite many wealthier urban neighbourhoods receiving 1/1 Gbps symmetrical Internet today, scalable to 40 Gbps in the next few years.[viii] Scott demonstrates that he misunderstands that Internet access, unlike wanting a bigger, faster car, is not a discretionary purchase, it is an essential service. Scott and Maryam Monsef, Minister for Women and Gender Equality and Rural Economic Development, need to understand that to the extent that rural residents and businesses have Internet service that is not equal in accessibility, price and performance, to their wealthier urban Canadian peers, then these rural and low-income urban Canadians do not have equal access to public safety, healthcare, education, government and the right to earn a living. It inhibits their ability to contribute to and benefit from our economy and society. The lack of scalable, highly available, symmetrical, low latency Internet connectivity capable of supporting multiple applications simultaneously to all Canadians, i.e., FTTP and LTE, is perhaps the largest barrier to ministers fulfilling their statutory mandates to deliver universal access to public safety, healthcare, education and government services today and in the future. Given the core strategies and ministerial mandates of these ministries and departments is to deliver public safety, healthcare, education and government services over the Internet to equally all Canadians at home and on the move all departments and ministries must be engaged to ensure this outcome.[ix]
If we continue down the path of funding small incremental upgrades to rural broadband infrastructure, rural residents will continue to have to shell out subsidies for these investments. TSPs, particularly ILECs, have demonstrated for many years, that these incremental investments will only be made by them if their capital programs are subsidized by taxpayers and ratepayers. With no competitive imperative or regulatory mandate to change their behaviour ILECs and other incumbents will play the waiting game in rural areas. Without subsidies, they will continue to deliver the same, slower, asymmetrical, best effort, legacy wireline and fixed wireless Internet services at the highest prices the traffic will bear.
That the CRTC policy is Canadians living in rural and remote communities “should have” access to 50/10 Mbps Internet by 2030 demonstrates their failure to grasp the systemically engrained inequality that they are hardwiring into rural and remote communities, which will continue to stifle those Canadians’ ability to equally contribute to and benefit from our economy and society. Therefore, the target of 50/10 Mbps by 2030, which makes the digital divide between urban and rural communities and between wealthier urban neighbourhoods and poorer urban neighbourhoods even wider than it is today, must not stand. The 50/10 Mbps by 2030 standard is tantamount to relegating rural, remote and lower income urban areas to “the new dial-up,” versus their higher income urban peers because these urban neighbourhoods already have 1/1 Gbps connections. Moreover, ILECs have built their FTTP infrastructure in these higher income urban neighbourhoods to scale to 40 Gbps before 2030 as recently announced by Bell.[x] This situation, if not rectified soon, will have lasting negative economic and social consequences for rural, remote and lower income urban Canadians and if the 50/10 Mbps target is allowed to stand, it will enduringly entrench inequities in economic opportunity and social equality for generations to come.
[i] https://www.oag-bvg.gc.ca/internet/English/parl_oag_201811_01_e_43199.html
[ii] https://mprempel.ca/news/f/connect-canada---call-to-action-on-rural-internet-access
[iii] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-brookfield-insfrastructure-buying-us-telecom-company-cincinnati-bell/
[iv] https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/its-on-bells-all-fibre-broadband-network-is-now-lighting-up-toronto-678848503.html
[v] https://optics.fiberbroadband.org/Full-Article/fiber-broadband-association-research-shows-record-fiber-broadband-growth-in-north-america-1
[vi] https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.5404115?__twitter_impression=true
[vii] https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/publications/reports/policymonitoring/2018/cmr3c.htm
[viii] https://www.bce.ca/news-and-media/releases/show/It-s-On-Bell-s-all-fibre-broadband-network-is-now-lighting-up-Toronto-1
[ix] https://www.canada.ca/en/government/system/digital-government/digital-operations-strategic-plan-2018-2022.html#ToC5
[x] https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/its-on-bells-all-fibre-broadband-network-is-now-lighting-up-toronto-678848503.html