Municipal broadband: OpenMedia's latest campaign

City councillors are starting to get a small stream of form emails advocating for what is often called “municipal broadband”. It’s been a frequent topic of discussion over the years, and it’s good to see Open Media putting it back on the front-burner as the organizer of this campaign.

Briefly, municipal broadband would leverage municipally-owned fibre optic networks to provide alternative Internet services to what we used to call the cable/phone duopoly in most Canadian communities. There’s no serious discussion of large municipalities operating as ISPs, but a municipally-owned fibre network can serve as the open infrastructure over which competitors to the duopolists can offer alternative ISP services.

This was briefly touched on earlier this year when I and Councillor Diane Deans brought a motion to City Council supporting the CRTC’s decision to force fibre Internet providers such as Bell to make their next-generation networks available to competitors. While Bell had appealed that decision to Cabinet, that was sensibly declined (even if our Council motion didn’t pass).

Open Media’s most recent push is as the result of the most recent basic service objective decision about which I’ve been tweeting. The decision sets a new broadband availability target of 50 Mbps downloads and 10 Mbps uploads. The Commission chose not to mandate those speeds, but I was part of the shop there that worked on our previous target of 5/1 Mbps. While the Commission didn’t order anyone to provide those speeds, its moral suasion was, I’d argue, partly responsible for an accelerated rollout of higher-speed service. Keen to keep the Commission happy, I consider that providers will seek to ensure they’re seen to be trying to achieve the new threshold.

To help, the Commission has re-directed a portion of the funds used to help provide underserved areas with telephony service to broadband. That makes $750 million available to help accelerate rollout of high-speed internet service. I think it’s important to understand that the focus of this fund will be on un- and underserved areas. It’s unlikely the City, if it went down the municipal broadband path, would be eligible to tap into that money to provide competition to Bell and Rogers in downtown Ottawa. But, Ottawa is a very large municipality, and communities across the City continue to clamour for decent Internet speeds.

But, leveraging that funding could be part of a larger effort to piece together a municipal broadband network.

It’s not entirely off the radar at the City. I brought a motion last year to our IT sub-committee that puts the City on a path to becoming a “smart city”, and there are efforts underway to better understand what that means. In our IT shop, and especially at our municipally-owned Hydro Ottawa, there is a growing awareness of the potential for our growing fibre networks to be put to use for a broad swath of municipal services. While I’m a little underwhelmed that a staff report on smart city thinking so far focuses on shiny things, and not the key questions of open data, data creation, and changing municipal government culture, we’re at least on the path.

I’m not in a position to say today with any certainty what the next steps are with respect to pursuing a municipal broadband strategy. We know that any efforts on that front would see significant opposition and lobbying from the duopolists, and it will be challenging to convince Council colleagues of the benefits of investing. For the time being, this will probably stay at the level of informal conversation and fact-finding.

I’m committed to making progress on a reasonable timeframe to bring that discussion to the fore. The funding window won’t last forever, and it would be a shame to lose that opportunity. All I can say today to those writing, though, is stay tuned. I’m sympathetic and understand the benefits well. Let’s keep working together.