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: Network Neutrality

(Originally posted March 27th, 2007 at hitmis.postopolis.com)

What is it?

In it’s purest form, network neutrality provides transport to all traffic without discrimination. The idea is that the network carries any and all traffic and passes it on in the order it was received. However, there are variations on this definition.

Some would allow for quality of service(QoS) provisions within the definition of net neutrality. QoS allows for certain traffic to be passed at a higher priority. The network provide could, conceivably, charge to honour QoS provisions - and that fact is the start of the network neutrality debate.

If a service provider can charge to honour QoS, what’s to prevent them from degrading service for anyone who doesn’t pay for elevated service. Net neutrality activists point to events such as Telus blocking access for its customers to certain websites during a strike in 2005 and Shaw Communication’s (and here) decision to charge a fee to provide quality of service for users of competing VoIP solutions on Shaw Internet connections as indications that service providers will act against the interests of subscribers if they are allowed to.

What does it mean to me?

Well, that depends. Real time applications like voice over internet (VoIP) and videoconferencing (VC) work better when there are quality of service provisions. So, if those are your main applications, you’d like to be able to discriminate traffic and have VoIP or VC traffic delivered at a higher priority than, say, email traffic.

However, the fear is that service providers will extend the discrimination beyond classes of applications and in to specific sites. A large company could pay more to ensure that their website loads more quickly than their competitors’ sites. This would ‘encourage’ people to use that faster loading site and have a negative impact on the competitors. Practically speaking, anyone who could afford to pay for better deliver would and those who couldn’t would die.

This idea is very distressing to many in the Internet community. They point to the importance of neutrality in enabling innovation. Would Amazon have been able to build it’s business model if an existing bricks and mortar store could just dump a lot of cash into network access - causing everyone looking for books to go to the existing company site and not Amazon? Could some new search engine pay your ISP to load it faster than Google? In a world of many small businesses, the fear is that a few large ones could afford to play by the new rules at the expense of the many.

What is happening in Canada?

We’re behind the US, not surprisingly. In November 2006, CBC reported that the fight had arrived here. The telco’s want to let market forces dictate the evolution of services; activist organization, experts, and even big content providers (here, here, and here) want legislation.
Reading on the issue

NN fact and fiction (pro NN from FreePress)

Wikipedia Network Neutrality (neutral presentation of the issue)

Joining the Snake: A balanced and pragmatic approach to NN (from the Progress and Freedom Foundation)