FedNor has stepped back from funding broadband Internet service expansion in rural parts of Northern Ontario and Timmins-James Bay MP Charlie Angus says the cuts will affect business expansion and economic growth in the region.
“This should be a real no-brainer for the federal government to recognize,” said Angus, who is the NDP's critic for FedNor. “We've had project after project cancelled. From an economic point of view this makes no sense at all.”
But FedNor has said the federal government remains committed to increasing high-speed broadband coverage across Canada through Industry Canada's Connecting Canadians program.
“Through the Connecting Canadians program, the government will be expanding high-speed Internet access to approximately 300,000 households in rural and remote areas across the country,” said FedNor spokesperson Larry Duval.
The call for applications for the program ended on Jan. 12, 2015, and Duval said eight projects in Northern Ontario, targeting close to 40,000 households, have received a combined $10.6 million from the program.
“Budget 2016 announced an investment of up to $500 million over five years for a new program to extend and enhance broadband service in rural and remote communities throughout the country,” Duval added.
But Susan Church, executive director of North Bay's Blue Sky Economic Growth Corporation, said there were 18 broadband expansion projects in Northern Ontario that had their FedNor funding scrapped.
Without support from FedNor, which has typically represented around 40 per cent of the cost for each project, those initiatives must return to the drawing board.
Blue Sky is a non-profit organization tasked with expanding broadband Internet access in Northern Ontario.
Church said around four per cent of Canadians still do not have access to basic broadband Internet as its defined by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) – with a minimum download speed of five megabits per second (Mbps) and an upload speed of one Mbps.
The majority of Canadians without access to basic broadband service live in rural and remote communities, including many in Northern Ontario.
Church said FedNor, and regional organizations like Blue Sky, are most qualified to help expand rural Internet access because they have a closer understanding of the needs in their regions.
In addition to the Connecting Canadians program, companies like Woodstock, New Brunswick's Xplornet are working to expand rural Internet access through privately funded initiatives.
Xplornet plans to launch a new satellite in 2017, that would offer broadband Internet access with speeds of up to 25 Mbps to many rural and remote parts of Canada.
Chris Johnston, Xplornet's executive vice-president of marketing, said the company's 10 Mbps plans would cost between $60 and $65 per month.
But due to technological limitations, satellite Internet has higher data caps than other forms of broadband delivery, such as cable and fibre.
Xplornet's highest tiered package currently, using an older satellite, offers download speeds of five Mbps with a data cap of 50 gigabytes for $90 per month.
But Johnston said data caps with the new satellite will be much higher.
“The nature of satellites is such that the capacity on a satellite is fixed. You can't expand it,” he said.
Xplornet has also gotten funding from the Connecting Canadians program to build 100 fixed-wireless sites across Northern Ontario, including 12 in the Sudbury region.
The towers would offer wireless Internet to rural and remote customers, and are expected to be built between 2016 and 2018.
