We Need This Information

Jeff Green | Aug 23, 2023

I was somewhat surprised by the lukewarm reaction of the Frontenac County Planning and Economic Development Advisory Committee to the proposal by the Canadian Internet Registration Authority to set up a Community Broadband Performance Testing Program for $4,000 per year.

The committee approved a motion to pass it on the council, but only one or two members seemed particularly enthusiastic and some were downright hostile.

For one thing, the County budget is over $40 million, so the cost will not cause big bump in taxes.

More importantly, for many Frontenac County residents and businesses, Internet access is something they think about a lot, some of them every day, as they struggle to hold meetings and upload files.

Internet speeds are like reliable Hydro power. People who have reliable hydro never think about it at all, but when it goes off they think of little else.

Last week, there were articles and stories all over Toronto about the 20th anniversary of the 2003 power outage. The stories said that in some, extreme cases, people were without power for over 24 hours.

I could feel the eyes rolling in North Frontenac over that one. That kind of thing can happen monthly in some locations, where a power outage is only real if it lasts through at least two sleeps.

A good test of people's relative interest in this topic is to consider whether they even know what an Internet Speed Test.

I was visiting my son and his partner in Halifax a couple of years ago, and was trying to work virtually from their apartment. I notice the Internet was rally fast and asked what kind of speeds they had. They had no idea what I was talking about. I used an Internet Speed Test, which they had also never heard about, and saw they were in the 100mg/second range or higher for download speeds and half that for uploads.

No wonder they never thought about it.

For people trying to work at home, people with teenagers, or people who use the Internet a lot for entertainment of information in rural areas, Internet service is a big deal. If this program gets set up, it is those people who will need to participate in order for it to be an effective program.

Once the Frontenac municipalities, and the county, have the real data that can be obtained if enough people register and set up their devices to collect the data automatically, they will be able to do a few big things. One is to advocate for better service in all locations, and say to the large companies who have received funding to provide this everywhere in rural Ontario that they need to do better, and the other is to know exactly what kind of service is really available for people.

I did test the peformance.cira.ca service, which is available to the public now, and would work the same way if Frontenac County enters into an agreement with CIRA to collect and map the data. It took a few minutes to verify my location, and set up an account, but once that was done I set the program for auto-test and I do not need to do anything else. The testing will be done, and the data will be available to me to see if I want to track my service over time. If the Frontenac County program is established, the only difference is that the data I have access to now, will my identity and private information removed, will go to the Frontenac database to be used in the interest of improving access to Internet across the entire county.

Given that access to Internet has been mentioned at almost every all candidate meeting that we have held during municipal elections over at least the last three election cycles, it is a real concern in both Frontenac and Lennox and Addington Counties.

Hopefully Frontenac County will see it that way, and CIRA will be able to deliver on the promises made about how the service will work.