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myvalleysun.com
October 17, 2013
Bullish on the real news in the Monashee
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ADSL
more money please
In the competition for federal bucks, where will Rural Lumby and Cherryville land? Will we continue to be the poor country cousins of the rich city folk?
While the basic installation of Broadband in rural Lumby and Cherryville has been slow to secure, Vernon began to experience an additional upgrade in April when Telus announced that it would invest $3 million in that community this year to expand 4G LTE wireless technologies and introduce Optik TV to more homes.
However, a groundswell of support is beginning to take shape for the rural Monashee as decision makers everywhere are finding it’s odd that this region so close to large population centres is without basic communication technology.
In fact the subject came up late last week when efforts to bring agricultural data online to farmers met with a harsh reality. The Agricultural Land Commission (ALC) is considering implementing an online application tracking system to digitally capture historic information and link the information to GIS mapping.
Area D Director Rick Fairbairn brought attention to a key problem in the ALC idea.
“This is all fine and dandy but over in Area D and Area E in Cherryville, we don’t have high speed internet so it makes it very difficult to engage in such opportunities,” he said.
Establishing the final costs for bringing Broadband to Areas D and E seems to be a work in progress but nevertheless, funding support is coming forward. Telus is committed to covering half of the total cost of the upgrade and the Southern Interior Development Initiative Trust has agreed to supply $100,000 to support bringing ADSL to Area’s D and E.
This past week both jurisdictions made individual applications which if successful, would bring $400,000 to support upgrading the required infrastructure so that Telus ADSL Broadband could be brought to both areas.
The Community Infrastructure Improvement Fund (CIIF) is a new, two-year national program that will invest $150 million to rehabilitate and improve existing community infrastructure across Canada. It’s intended to help modernize infrastructure and provide broad-based economic benefits to communities.
The funding is intended to cover up to half of a projects total cost and it appears that one of the many criteria includes, “improving existing community infrastructure assets which have a local community impact such as connectivity and broadband.”
While funding support from CIIF might be a good fit for rural Broadband, competition for those federal dollars might be stiff. By applying some very loose and theoretical math, the $150 million that is available for the country could mean that each federal riding might receive about $500,000 and while we know that funding will most certainly not be dolled out equally across the country or between ridings, this figure might still be used to place the rural ADSL project in context with other proposals.
The City of Vernon has also applied for funding from CIIF. They applied for three different projects totaling $300,000 which includes $200,000 to resurface the Vernon airport runway.
"It's starting to crack, and we need to do the resurfacing in no later than three years or we'll run into much bigger costs," said Vernon Mayor Rob Sawatzky.
If the city gets the grant, it will provide another $200,000 for the resurfacing.
The city also applied for $75,000 from CIIF to replace playground equipment at Mission Hill and Kiwanis parks, and $25,000 for upgrading the Vernon Community Arts Centre.
Vernon council decided not to apply for $100,000 in funds to bring free WiFi Internet into Vernon’s downtown core.
Mayor Sawatzky said the majority of council was opposed to the WiFi proposal.
"The reasons were mainly that it was interfering with private businesses providing the same service."
Sawatzky himself was in favour of the idea, saying many other communities provide free WiFi. He told Kiss FM, "WiFi in the downtown core probably fits with the marketing image of ourselves as being tourist-friendly, business-friendly, that sort of thing."
Wayne Ikesaka, the city's information services manager says the project would have provided free wireless service for about 1 km of the downtown, from east to west along 30th Avenue, and up to 100 meters north to south of 30th Avenue.
"The wireless foot print would provide coverage for an estimated 100,000 meters square, and would provide public WiFi service for about 340 businesses," he says.
While Vernon has dropped the WiFi proposal, it is still applying for $300,000 and other communities in the Regional District of the North Okanagan and the Columbia Shuswap Regional District have probably submitted proposals as well.
These jurisdictions are all part of the federal constituency of Okanagan Shuswap and these singular efforts remain a classic example of regional competition between communities. This is very much a game of chance and it should not surprise us that many community applications will be partnered with casino gaming grants.
So many of us will wait patiently while we ask the question: Will over 3000 residents, public places and businesses, farms and ranches in Areas D and E have access to basic Broadband technology anytime soon?
One would hope that the long wait and pure logic of the Monashee rural Broadband proposal will trump repaving an airport runway, playground equipment, or renovations for an art centre. However one needs to consider that the large population found in urban centres often trumps the sparse population of rural areas which is precisely why the urban-rural divide is widening.
Perhaps, someday decision makers in communities throughout the region will work together to create fair and equal strategies so that there is a logical progression of supporting community needs in the Okanagan Shuswap as a whole.
That would be nice.
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August 9, 2012 - By Don Elzer
Residents of Areas D and E have been trying to secure basic Broadband for nearly a decade and have been faced with significant hurdles in trying to educate politicians and funding agencies about the importance of having high-speed Internet in these rural areas.
