Rural broadband: Gaps, maps and challenges

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tele.2021.101565Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Rural broadband strategies in Canada face data and mapping challenges.

  • Research shows challenges with being deemed “served” or “underserved”.

  • In southwestern Ontario rural Internet quality levels may fall below the government’s aspirational targets.

  • We recommend provider reported data cross-referenced with user experience data and detailed mapping.

Abstract

This paper examines challenges to evidence-based decision-making in the design and implementation of rural broadband investment programs. Our focus is on Canada, and the apparent need for further intra-rural broadband research and better data and mapping for informing public investment decisions, but similar challenges are evident in the international literature. Based on proprietary telecommunication provider datasets, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunication Commission (CRTC) estimates that broadband services with advertised speeds that meet its basic universal service targets (50 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload) are available to 87.4 percent of households in Canada. In rural areas however, services that meet CRTC’s speed targets are available to 45.6 percent of households. Moreover, effective speeds and service quality levels that suppliers deliver and users experience tend to fall well below the government’s aspirational targets. In response to demand for better broadband, a variety of initiatives are directing public investment to the deployment of regional and rural broadband networks, which are typically owned and operated by private companies. There remains a serious lack of relevant data and its effective use in creating rural broadband strategies and managing public investment projects. Evidence from the literature suggest that this affects the degree and quality of geo-spatial and econometric analysis that results in a limited empirical basis to allocate scarce public investments, aggregate demand of consumers/communities, and assess the outcomes of rural broadband initiatives ex post. This paper provides a historical overview of rural broadband development in Canada and questions if the body of knowledge to inform public investment initiatives has grown sufficiently to ensure their effectiveness and sustainability. With a regional case from southwestern Ontario, Canada, we discuss the findings of the literature review, characterize the broadband data challenge, and discuss the importance of proprietary provider data cross-referenced with Internet user experience data.

Introduction

“High speed access to the Internet is one bit of infrastructure that shrinks our geographic isolation. It matters more than rail, road, or sewer and water. It is the underpinning for the new economy. Employment in the agriculture industry continues to, and will, continue to shrink. Maintenance of a critical mass of (rural) population is dependent on bridging the digital divide. These are not buzz words if you live on the other side of that divide. The very first dollar going to rural areas should be targeted at high speed, period. We will do the rest.”

National Broadband Task Force (Canada, 2001) survey participant from Saskatchewan, extract from “The New National Dream: Networking the Nation for Broadband Access.”1

In Canada, around 20 percent of the population resides full-time in census-defined rural areas (Statistics Canada, 2018).2 Rural areas contribute approximately 23 percent of the national gross domestic product. Over the past two decades, significant public and private investments have helped expand “high-speed”/broadband Internet access to rural areas and remote communities. Yet, access to high quality and affordable broadband continues to be an elusive “national dream.” Many rural Canadians no longer make their primary livelihood from farming, or other natural resource-based production. Since the start of the 21st century, Canada’s rural areas have experienced substantial employment diversification which requires reliable information and communication technologies (ICTs). Regions with a high age-dependency ratio (relatively older and younger populations) also require online learning and telehealth services, particularly during the current COVID-19 pandemic as people now have little option but to work, study and stay at home (Canadian Rural Revitalization Foundation, 2020). A further driver for rural connectivity is the advent of cloud-based data intensive, precision technologies in agriculture and rural natural resource management that provides food, water and a range of primary goods for domestic use and export (Chowdury and Hambly, 2018).

From a telecommunications perspective, the unique context of most rural areas, in Canada, and around the world, involves physical distance from markets, low population density, and conditions such as weather, topography and geographical remoteness. All these factors present challenges for telecommunications infrastructure development, namely in the context of this paper, broadband Internet access infrastructure. The private sector Telecommunication Service Providers (TSPs) own and operate broadband infrastructure and services in Canada. With notable exceptions of community or municipal-owned networks, the market, subject to regulation by the Canadian Radio-Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), supplies rural Internet connections. Three levels of government (federal, provincial or territorial and municipal) try to incentivize supply with subsidies to serve and upgrade infrastructure in unserved or underserved rural communities, as well as other forms of inducements such as tax credits and concessions (Rajabiun and Middleton, 2013a). Innovation, Science and Economic Development (ISED) is the federal ministry responsible for broadband policy support and programming. At the provincial and territorial levels, various agencies may be involved.3

Rural broadband is an especially “hot topic” in Canadian policymaking with intense public scrutiny during the COVID-19 pandemic (SCIST, 2018, Canadian Rural Revitalization Foundation, 2020). According to 2019 data compiled by ISED and CRTC, 63 percent of rural households in Canada lacked Internet access services at speeds that meet CRTC’s 50/10 Mbps “basic service” target, compared with three percent of urban homes (Canadian Radio-Television Commission (CRTC), 2019a, Canadian Radio-Television Commission (CRTC), 2019b). The problem is acute in northern and indigenous communities, especially where users have little option but to rely on old, slow, and expensive wireless and satellite-based broadband technologies. In a report tabled by the Office of the Auditor General of Canada on rural and remote connectivity it was stated:

“We concluded that Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada and the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, according to their respective roles and responsibilities, monitored the state of connectivity but did not share enough detailed information publicly. We also concluded that Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada did not develop and implement a national strategy to improve broadband Internet connectivity to a specific service level in rural and remote areas” (Office of the Auditor General of Canada, 2018, section 1.82)

In January 2019, the newly established Minister of Rural Economic Development released High-Speed Access for All: Canada’s Connectivity Strategy.4 The Strategy aims to deliver 50/10 Mbps connectivity to 90 percent of Canadians by 2021, 95 percent of the national population by 2026, and the hardest-to-reach Canadians by 2030. Response from rural residents and businesses to the aspirational targets is sober, particularly as more urban residential areas can access gigabit service. A widening “digital divide” in Canada makes rural broadband research and policy development a genuine work-in-progress. Broadband supply and consumer demand are growing rapidly, including next generation satellite technologies that promise to meet demand for reliable low-latency broadband in areas where the costs of deploying fixed fibre/hybrid fibre/wireless networks are prohibitive.5 The next generation fibre, wireless, and satellite infrastructure that enables much faster connections lies at the heart of what is essentially a new “bio-digital economy” where precision agricultural technologies, cloud services and secure big data transfers are paramount, including those digital technologies essential to environmental disaster management (Shim et al., 2007, Chowdury and Hambly, 2018, Bronson, 2019). More broadly, rural areas require broadband-enabled ICTs to support and sustain ecosystems that provide the basics of human life – namely, clean air, water and food at regional and global scales (OECD, 2018). The recent COVID-19 pandemic has made this even more apparent to the majority of Canadians who live and telecommute from suburban and rural areas outside of city centres. All levels of government in Canada cannot help but recognize the role of broadband services for positive social and economic development. Questions remain about the role the public sector can play in fostering the emergence of high-quality broadband connections that meet growing demand for reliable, affordable, ultra-high speed/low latency Internet access.

This paper proceeds to review the literature and examine a regional case of expanding broadband services in Ontario, Canada in order to identify and discuss the digital gaps, data and mapping challenges in evidence-based decision-making in rural broadband investment programs. We first discuss the emergence of the term “rural broadband” and highlight a few conceptual approaches to research in this area. Collapsed into characterizations of “last mile”, digital divide, or incentivized as special projects, rural broadband features in thousands of pages of Canadian policy and advocacy. The next section provides an overview of our research methods and sources of data for the paper. The findings of the literature review suggest that over time, the academic work appears to shift methodologically, from only small sample, qualitative case studies to quantitative analyses with mixed methods and bigger data sources. There is rare access, for academic research purposes, to proprietary telecommunication data, which limits the scope for outcome analysis, program evaluation, and learning from the mistakes of the past. Improved data stewardship, we argue, is needed to address the challenges associated with reconciling official government speed mapping data and service quality levels users experience. There is limited econometric analysis with time-series/panel data and bigger datasets of user experience/consumer survey data. In the second part of the paper, we discuss the broadband gaps, data and mapping challenges in the context of southwestern Ontario, where a major broadband investment program is underway. We identify analytical considerations involving data and mapping that are relevant to rural broadband investments. In the end, we find there is more effort needed to collect bigger and better data to support more efficient and effective decision making by public policymakers and private sector providers.

Section snippets

Defining rural broadband in Canada

Rural broadband is a concept that dates back nearly five decades, well before the advanced digital technologies known today. The term “rural broadband” was initially used in policy documents in the 1970s, but it was a very different era of telecommunications.6

Materials and methods

Analysis of the literature for this paper uses thematic coding of literature in a documents database started in 2006 and maintained by the Regional and Rural Broadband (R2B2) project at the University of Guelph (Canada). Informed by the efforts of Salemink et al. (2017) who review rural broadband literature (mainly focused on Europe), we performed additional searches for word frequency in titles and abstracts of academic journals in four databases: Web of Science (WoS), JSTOR, Google Scholar

Results of the literature review

We concentrate on the identified findings in the R2B2 documents database for three areas of analysis in this paper. The first area is the dominance in the assembled literature of the argument that a rural digital divide persists into the second millennial decade, even in Canada’s relatively more populous provinces such as Ontario (38.8% of the national population) and urbanized regions such as southwestern Ontario. The second theme is that closing the gap requires public investment, how rural

Regional and rural broadband in southwestern Ontario

We now examine the issues identified in the review of literature and policy documents in the context of a major regional broadband infrastructure improvement initiative in southwestern Ontario. The focus of the project is an area bordering the Great Lakes, west of the Greater Toronto Area. The region has approximately 10 percent of the Canadian population, or about 3.5 million residents. A major investment in rural broadband, referred to as SWIFT, Southwestern Integrated Fibre Technology Inc.,

Final discussion and conclusions

Rural broadband data may be better generated and directly analyzed within regional initiatives like SWIFT, and aggregated to the national level, rather than a top-down national broadband mapping approach. In this respect, local and dynamic elements can be taken into account in the analysis – for example, the relation of connectivity in census rural areas to the types of connections available regionally, which implicate data on urban and suburban communities. While traditionally used for

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This paper reports research from the Regional and Rural Broadband (R2B2) project at the University of Guelph. We acknowledge assistance on figures and maps from David Worden, R2B2 Economist and Matt Rapke, SWIFT GIS Specialist. The authors thank WOWC-SWIFT for their research collaboration. All errors and omissions are the sole responsibility of the authors.

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