The Ontario Chamber of Commerce, along with the Greater Sudbury Chamber of Commerce, have called on the province to invest more to expand broadband access.
In an open letter to Premier Kathleen Wynne, the chamber network said the provincial government should take three steps to improve broadband access for people who live in remote and rural parts of the province.
Those are to develop a robust broadband investment strategy that identifies broadband as an infrastructure investment and does not dissuade private sector investment; build partnerships across all levels of government in order to leverage funding and respond to local need; and to benchmark Ontario’s internet speeds and access so they can be compared to other jurisdictions.
“Local businesses in Greater Sudbury and surrounding areas are becoming increasingly dependent on internet access for their everyday business practices,” said Tracy Nutt, chair of the Greater Sudbury Chamber of Commerce, in a press release. “High-speed internet access has become a necessity for doing business in today’s economy and it is critical that all regions across Ontario have access to this essential infrastructure.”
The Ontario Chamber of Commerce said a 10-per-cent increase in household broadband penetration could accelerate economic growth by up to 1.5 percentage points.
Earlier in July, Timmins-James Bay MP Charlie Angus was critical of federal cuts to FedNor and its efforts to expand broadband Internet access in remote and rural parts of Ontario.
“This should be a real no-brainer for the federal government to recognize,” Angus told Sudbury.com. “We've had project after project cancelled. From an economic point of view this makes no sense at all.”
But FedNor spokesperson Larry Duval responded that Industry Canada's Connecting Canadians program has taken over those responsibilities and plans to expand high-speed Internet access to approximately 300,000 households.
According to some estimates 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.
