Hi All –
Just a head’s up that we a journalist/videographer that has been spending time with a community network in Northern Canada in a First Nations community. I have no idea when the video will be ready, but we’ll try to introduce that team to DC-3.
Also note the info below on a huge new initiative by the Canadian Government…they are keen to work on community networks and with their first nations communities. We will send more data when we have it:
Rural broadband program aims to bring 300 communities up to speed
News | THE WIRE REPORT
Published: Thursday, 12/15/2016 5:11 pm EST
WAKEFIELD, Que. — The federal government’s new rural broadband program will focus on making high-speed connections, as opposed to simply forging Internet connections for rural and remote
communities, Innovation, Science and Economic Development Minister Navdeep Bains said Thursday, in announcing some of the long-awaited details to the Liberal commitment outlined in this spring’s budget.
The new program, which will operate under the name Connect to Innovate, picks up where the previous government’s Connecting Canadians program left off, with $500 million through 2021 to
improve the Internet connections in 300 communities across the country.
The government is focused on “investments to really provide businesses and households the ability to have higher speeds and higher connectivity so they can get the data they need so they
can run their businesses, for example, so they can get a good quality education; it really impacts their lives,” Bains told reporters after announcing the new program parameters in the Wakefield, Que., library.
The program will primarily support, on a cost-sharing basis, what Bains called the “digital highway,” the middle-mile backbone infrastructure, with an emphasis on fibre, “because the idea
is we want to increase the speed and capacity, and fibre connectivity is a key part,” he said. Some of the program’s funds will also be allocated to create last-mile connections for households and businesses that don’t have access to speeds of at least 5 Mbps.
The new program keeps the previous government’s high-speed threshold of a 5 Mbps download speed, though Bains said he “must confess that’s very, very slow. It’s the bare, bare minimum.”
Bains added: “We are now in 2016, there are many Canadians who need much higher speeds, a much better response rate. That’s why we’re focused on broadband connectivity — so once you get
that fibre-to-the-institute, fibre-to-the-home, hopefully that speed will increase enormously, and be 10 times, potentially, faster than that.”
John Lawford, executive director of the Public Interest Advocacy Centre, noted in a phone interview the low speed and highlighted the CRTC’s basic services proceeding during which some
said that a 5 Mbps target was outdated, while others called it sufficient for a basic service.
During the public hearing in the spring, northern Internet Service Providers (ISPs) said that setting minimum speeds was less important than having resources to build backbone infrastructure.
According to the program’s website, 1 Gbps is the threshold for funding new, or upgrading existing, backbone connections.
The focus on the middle mile is a course correction from the previous program, Stuart Jack, a partner at Nordicity, said in a phone interview.
“I think they’ve got it right in terms of enabling more middle-mile investment, bringing fibre into the town and then letting various service suppliers compete within the town itself,”
Jack said. “From an economics point of view, of how do you enable competition best with public investment, that’s probably the right balance.”
In an email statement, Rogers Communications Inc. spokesman Andrew Garas said the company is “pleased to see the government’s investment in connecting the remaining Canadians who don’t
yet have access to high speed Internet and we look forward to reviewing the program details.”
Looking ahead to next week when the CRTC unveils its decision from the basic service hearing, the federal program will serve as a “helpful stop-gap measure for access” until the implications
of that decision are fully meted out, Lawford said, adding that overall the program was positive, though not the whole solution.
“Consider the climate four years ago,” Lawford said of broadband in Canada. “It was a complete wasteland… We’ve come a long way.”
In a press release, advocacy group OpenMedia said any investment is welcome, but that the country needs a “comprehensive National Broadband Strategy to ensure rural and remote Canadians
can catch up.”
Connect to Innovate is open to any entity aside from individuals and other federal bodies.
Where Connecting Canadians initially set a goal of connecting 280,000 households, the new program doesn’t have such a target, focusing instead on hitting 300 out of the 1,600 communities
the department has identified as eligible for new backbone funding.
“But I’m confident that our objective right now is to get that fibre-to-the-institute, fibre to the communities. And in some cases, we might focus on the last mile, in other cases, once
we get it there, that’s significant enough to do the hub-and-spoke model which will allow that connectivity to go to different homes,” Bains said of the variable number of households Connect to Innovate will affect.
More than 250 stakeholders were consulted while putting together the program, Bains said at the announcement, which was attended by nearly a dozen Liberal MPs who represent rural ridings.
The consultation led to creating a flexible model, said Bains, though he noted that satellite-dependent communities still face challenges.
“The minute we receive the proposals, we’re going to be evaluating them and getting the money out quickly. It’s really, really important,” he said, adding that “there’s many communities
that are reliant on satellite, for example, for Internet connectivity and there’s capacity issues. So we’re very mindful that we have to act very soon.”
Applications will be accepted from Jan. 16 to March 13.
— With reporting by Charelle Evelyn at cevelyn@thewirereport.ca and editing by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca
Internet Society | www.internetsociety.org
Skype: janercoffin
Mobile/WhatsApp: +1.202.247.8429
From:
<dc3-bounces@listas.altermundi.net> on behalf of Raoul Plommer <plommer@gmail.com>
Reply-To: Dynamic Coalition on Community Connectivity <dc3@listas.altermundi.net>
Date: Sunday, December 18, 2016 at 12:37 PM
To: Dynamic Coalition on Community Connectivity <dc3@listas.altermundi.net>
Subject: Re: [DC3] DC3 Researchers group
Ideally, the website will be our "observatory". We should gather all research there, once it's up and running. In the meantime, we should make a virtual pad for it, to avoid trawling emails all over again.
-Raoul
-
On Dec 18, 2016 10:55, "Nicolas" <nico@libre.ws> wrote:
Awesome Leandro.
So... this proposal was born in the context of many conversations
around the University of Guadalajara.
We have met many researchers that may be interested to collaborate with
us, but we need to do a little bit of extra effort to have them on
board.
What I feel we need to do is to encourage them to touch topics that
they were not used to touch, and that could happen on a place (like a
mailing list) were we can stimulate them for that.
Do you have any idea on how we can do this?
And now that I know the many initiatives around, do we have an
Observatory of our field so we can have all this researches together
and show the interest that the research movement have on our field?
Regards,
On Sun, 2016-12-18 at 16:33 +0100, Leandro Navarro wrote:
> On 17/12/16 14:54, Nicolas wrote:
>
> > Hi All,
> >
> > Maureen and I have been having many interesting meetings this week
> > in
> > Guadalajara (and we will share the outcomes shortly).
> > One thing we saw was that there are many people on the academic
> > sector
> > that share our vision and want to contribute by doing research
> > papers
> > on our field.
> >
> > What do you think about building a group that gets together all our
> > existing research fellows, where we can start adding people?
>
> Hi, my opinion is that this already exists in a wider scope, the
> ICT4D
> community. One example is the excellent work IPID is doing for so
> many
> years: http://groupspaces.com/ipid
> Regarding academic conferences (and communities around), we have
> http://acmdev.org/ for the more technology oriented, and
> http://ictd2017.itu.edu.pk/ for the more interdisciplinary.
> For instance the ACMDEV 2015 had several papers about community
> networks, and the best paper award was given to one about WISPs from
> U
> Berkeley: http://dev6.acmdev.org/program.php
>
> There are also very relevant academic journals. One is " The Journal
> of
> Community Informatics". For instance this special issue:
> http://ci-journal.net/index.php/ciej/issue/view/54 is very nice.
> You'll
> see familiar names there.
>
> A lesson learned (not only for me) is that research in ICT4D requires
> recognized forums that can promote high-quality complementary
> collaborations and publications, that can be competitive and compared
> under normal academic quality metrics. That can enable research
> careers
> in these areas, visibility and research impact, which are long-term
> critical issues. For these reasons, I find more effective and
> sustainable to join and contribute to reinforce existing established
> and
> slightly wider-scope research communities.
>
> Regards, Leandro.
> >
> > Would that benefit our process?
> >
> > Regards,
> > _______________________________________________
> > DC3 mailing list
> > DC3@listas.altermundi.net
> > https://listas.altermundi.net/mailman/listinfo/dc3
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> DC3 mailing list
> DC3@listas.altermundi.net
> https://listas.altermundi.net/mailman/listinfo/dc3
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