Olds, AB - Fastest Home Internet in Canada!

According to this CBC story small towns are getting faster Internet service before the big cities. I'll leave you to read their reasoning. I want to pick up on the Olds story, because a project that I worked on helped make it possible.

The synopsis: Olds, AB chose to build fibre infrastructure within their town, enabling them to provide gigabit Internet service to end-users, including home users. A key driver for doing this was to keep businesses from leaving for better connected locations. You can read this story from 2013 for more info.

What I want to point out is that Olds would never have had the capacity to do this without the Alberta SuperNet. SuperNet is the broadband fibre network that brings Internet connectivity to Olds. No business would have build this link to the community and without it, the speed at which you can connect within Olds would be throttled at the pipe out to the world at large.

Regardless of your personal politics, the Alberta Government did a good thing with the SuperNet. And I am proud to have been a part of that project. My role was small (I helped the public libraries design and implement their connections to the SuperNet) but it takes a lot of people making small contributions to make something like this a reality.

Kudos to Olds. Kudos to the decision makers who had the foresight to make the Alberta SuperNet a reality. And kudos to everyone still working to make sure that the power of this new resource is available to everyone in Alberta.

Also, this shows that sometimes we need public bodies to create the infrastructure we need for the 21st Century. If we left this job to commercial enterprises, they would not build it. Why not? Because it's not cost-effective. That's why, even in large cities, we don't have better service. It's also why I'm pro-Net Neutrality. We don't see every electricity producer putting up power lines to carry their power to their customers - it's too expensive to build the infrastructure - yet as consumers we can choose who supplies the power. It is going to have to be the same for Internet. There are a few distributors who build the delivery infrastructure and we get to choose the provider of the actual service. The distributors should have no right to decide which traffic is delivered first just as the power distributor has no right to decided that solar generated power gets delivered faster than wind generated power.

In summary: SuperNet - good. Net-Neutrality - I'm in favour.

Have a great Wednesday.

Archive: Technology and Alberta

(Originally published July 19th, 2006 at hitmis.postopolis.com)

Today I was reviewing some notes I took a while back that directed me to look into the Alberta ICT Council. From there I discovered some really interesting sites that I wanted to direct you to.

20/20 Network is trying to create an ‘Alberta Chamber of Technologies’ in order to facilitate Alberta’s ability to take advantage of a new, knowledge/technology based economy. To me it looks like this is the group of people trying to answer my earlier questions about ‘what is the knowledge economy and how do we foster it in Alberta?’

From there, I found the “Alberta Technology Chamber of Commerce” blog. The most recent posting there paints a gloomy picture of Alberta’s ability to be successful in the tech sector.

Booming Economy Aside, Nearly Half of Alberta’s Tech Firms Would Leave the Province - 2006 Alberta Technology Report

The Ernst & Young report reveals that 80% of technology companies continue to cite a lack of available financing as a key challenge

I haven’t spent much time reading through either site yet, but I am expecting them both to be sources of information that I’ll use for this blog in the future.

If you want to get more involved in shaping Alberta’s tech future, I’d suggest you look into participating in the discussions at 20/20 Network.