Grassroots Wireless Internet

Small/remote communities in Canada are grabbing the broadband bull by the horns—aggregating demand, grabbing government subsidies, and setting up their own fixed wireless networks. Should ISPs care?

by Gerry Blackwell

Fixed wireless clearly makes a lot of sense as a way to bridge Al Gore's "digital divide"—i.e., extend broadband Internet access to rural and small town areas of the country.

Some resourceful ISPs are actually building their own wireless infrastructure to do this. Witness Montana Sky Network in remote northwestern Montana, one of the first wireless ISPs we wrote about here.

Montana Sky used a combination of a satellite connection to the Internet backbone and its own unlicesed broadband wireless infrastructure to reach some very far-flung customers.

In my homeland, Canada, aka the Great White North, where distances are vast and people few, some communities aren't waiting for existing service providers to cross that great divide.

A good thing, too, since many would wait forever.

Pulling together
Instead, they're banding together and building their own community broadband wireless networks. Or, in at least one case, using the threat of it to lever the local ILEC to invest in upgraded wireline infrastructure.

Either way, ISPs get to come along for the ride.

It's an interesting process with an element to it, as we'll see, of playing chicken on the information superhighway.

But whether the process is transferrable to the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave is not clear. For one thing, the Canadian model often involves government funding.

(Isn't that, like, comm-u-nist or something?)

Different strokes
In Lanark County, near the nation's capital, Ottawa—a surprisingly remote place: the largest town has 8,000 souls—and in nearby Leeds-Grenville, two different paths have emerged.

Community groups in both places, and several others across Ontario, formed not-for-profit corporations so they could apply for matching funds under the provincial government's Telecommunications Access Partnerships (TAP) program.

Lanark Communications Network(LCN) and Upper Canada Networks Inc. (UCN) in Leeds-Grenville were both successful TAP applicants, scoring close to $2 million each.

More for less
UCN recently launched a one-node pilot network that is providing 3-megabit service for about $800 a month in and around tiny Kemptville, where it's based. The local ILEC, Bell Canada, wants about $1,650 for a T-1 connection—that's half the bandwidth for twice the price.

UCN plans eventually to roll out a robust wireless network using both licensed and unlicensed spectrum. It will serve schools, businesses, hospitals, and residents in towns and rural areas across the two counties of Leeds and Grenville.

The impetus in Leeds-Grenville was macroeconomic. UCN vice-chair and CEO Vic Allen, involved in the project since 1998, explains.

"It was clear to me," Allen says, "that unless we could get affordable connectivity in this region, we were going to be committed to old-economy status. The economy was already in decline here. We felt connectivity was an imperative."

It played out somewhat differently in Lanark—in a couple of ways.

Pro bono publico
There, the effort was less business/economic focused. The community followed a process fostered by Nortel Networks in its trademarked Integrated Community Network (ICN) program.

Part of the process in both cases involved polling local school districts, hospitals, businesses and governments to determine regional needs for broadband access—in effect, aggregating market demand.

Key stakeholders committed funds that TAP would match. The TAP funds weren't necessarily earmarked for engineering and deploying a broadband wireless network, just for ensuring, one way or another, that the region got broadband access.

Collective bargaining?
Once they'd lined up the user stakeholders, the next step was to try and negotiate with service providers to address that aggregated demand. In Lanark, says LCN chair Barrie Crampton, "we had interest, but just weren't able to consummate a deal."

So LCN rolled out Plan B—using the government funds to build its own wireless network.

"We were right down to the point of signing the purchase order for microwave equipment, completing an application for the spectrum and signing the license agreements for access to existing towers," Crampton relates.

Then at the last second, Bell Canada blinked.

Suddenly it decided it was interested in the business after all, and within days committed to upgrading infrastructure in the county and negotiating better prices.

Had Lanark been bluffing? Did Bell capitulate?

It's not quite that cut and dried, says Crampton, though he admits it was a sort of ultimatum from LCN that shifted Bell Canada off its duff at the end.

All's well . . .
Bell eventually rolled out OC-48 and OC-12 connections, established an ATM switching center in one town and deployed DSL well ahead of schedule in towns with as few as 4,000 people.

It also slashed broadband service rates by as much as 60 percent.

The key, clearly, was that LCN had very successfully aggregated market demand, making it much easier for Bell to make a business case for the infrastructure upgrades.

Another gamble?
Is Leeds-Grenville playing the same game of chicken?

It doesn't sound like it. Allen seems set on going through with building a community wireless network.

But UCN hasn't actually committed its funds for the wireless infrastructure yet. So it'll be interesting to see what transpires.

In other communities, including in the remote and sparsely populated northwest part of Ontario, building a wireless network is likely the only way the region will ever get ubiquitous broadband connectivity.

Another TAP-funded initiative there, the Broadband Wireless Multimedia Pilot Project, is currently engineering a pilot network it hopes to roll out in Sudbury and Thunder Bay later this fall.

ISP = Internet Service Partnership?
As in other communities, local ISPs are key project participants. And that may be the lesson for ISPs in all of this.

Where it's simply not feasible for one service provider to build the infrastructure needed to supply ubiquitous broadband coverage in an underpopulated region, there is this alternative.

Mobilize the community, educate it about the need for broadband, identify key applications and get commitments from potential users. Even if you can't get government money, the effort can still pay off.

And there is no reason why such a community initiative couldn't be led by a savvy local ISP.

—End