Globally, the demand for bandwidth is increasing exponentially. Alberta is also seeing an increased demand for bandwidth, as more education and work activities are carried out online, and as high-bandwidth mobile platforms become more ubiquitous. 

Currently, Alberta has two high-speed public fibre networks: the research and education network, CyberaNet, and the province-wide fibre optic network, the Alberta SuperNet. Both are available to a select portion of the population. Commercially, services are provided by the big three telecommunications providers — TELUS, Bell and Rogers — in addition to a number of regional competitors, most notably the Calgary-based Shaw Communications (although on March 15, 2021, Rogers announced a plan to acquire Shaw in a $26B merger, a deal which would eliminate Shaw as a regional competitor. As of the publication of this report, the deal is pending regulatory approval). 

The reach, bandwidth, and prices these providers offer can vary, and rural areas continue to struggle to obtain internet connections at a cost and speed comparable to the province’s urban areas. 

By the Numbers:

• Percentage of Canadians in the lowest income quintile with a home internet subscription (as of 2019): 65%¹
• Percentage of Canadian households without access to at least 50 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload (as of 2019): 16% 
• Median download speed in Canadian cities in 2021: 51.09 Mbps  
• Median rural download speeds in 2019: 9.74 Mbps² 
• Availability of internet service of 50 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload with unlimited data in rural Alberta : 33.2%

Recommendations for Improving Networking in Alberta

Short-term recommendations (1-3 years)

• Alberta needs a provincial broadband strategy. A comprehensive framework linking all connectivity technologies and opportunities across the province.

• Alberta needs coordinated leadership for the development of rural broadband solutions. A community of communities should be created to act as an aggregator and facilitator of resources (from across diverse sectors) to determine options for broadband adoption in Alberta. This could form part of the provincial broadband strategy.

• Unfair regulatory loopholes must be closed. The CRTC should ensure its appeals process and costing proceedings cannot be used by larger telecommunications players to delay decisions — such as wholesale pricing and support structure access — in order to negatively impact non-incumbent ISPs.

• Government and industry should further develop and promote Internet Exchange Points (IXPs). Calgary and Edmonton should grow their IXPs to improve internet resiliency, minimize long range data transport costs, and increase competition within the carrier market.

• Alberta should develop a coordinated approach to accessing the federal Universal Broadband Fund, either under the provincial broadband strategy, and/or under the coordinated leadership of the “community of communities”. Enabling piecemeal solutions for different providers or communities through grant submission programs should be phased out. Instead, the provincial government should offer a coordinated strategy, with cookie cutter solutions that can be rolled out across Alberta, optimizing grant funding through economies of scale.

• The Canadian Government should modify its National Broadband Access Map to be more granular and accurate, using additional testing and/or accessing CIRA’s Internet Performance Test data. Counties and other municipalities are being denied access to broadband grant funding due to inaccurate maps that falsely show them as being adequately served. This is most notable in shoulder communities around larger urban municipalities.

• The provincial government should leverage the Alberta SuperNet to make the province a national leader in broadband deployment. The Government of Alberta should ensure the implementation of the 2018 SuperNet agreement is better leveraged for rural broadband distribution. 

• The provincial government should leverage the Research & Education Network to make Alberta a national leader in equal access to online education tools. This should include continued investment in CyberaNet, the provincial R&E network, with a target of >1 Tbps capacity in the next five years to support modern learning applications and student success, as well as post-secondary big data research, and campus-to-commerce innovation.

Long-term recommendations (3-10 years)

• Equal access to telecommunications infrastructure should be available to all service providers. Telecommunications carriers should be just that — carriers — and not be given preferential treatment for their own competing retail services. More needs to be done by the CRTC to regulate these resources.

• Alberta’s broadband strategy should set a target of at least 100 Mbps symmetric internet bandwidth for all citizens. This would place Alberta among the top 20 countries for average internet access speeds.

• Government regulations should require all trenching of public land to include the installation of conduits that can carry public access fibre. This will greatly reduce the cost of building out infrastructure for future expansion.

• Government should work to ensure that next generation technologies — including Low Earth Orbit (LEO) Satellites, 5G, mesh networking, and the Internet of Things (IoT) — are utilized equitably in Alberta. Next generation technologies promise higher bandwidth access in geographic regions that have proven difficult to reach using legacy technologies. Provincial and federal governments should ensure they are deployed equitably. 

• Antenna tower and site sharing should be encouraged and facilitated by rural municipalities and land-use authorities in a way that supports the deployment of fixed area wireless.

References

¹Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) . Communications Monitoring Report 2020, pg. 28

²Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA). Canada’s Internet Equity Gap: Rural residents suffer with inferior service during pandemic. Accessed 08 July 2021.