10 ms·
Canadian government pledges to connect 98% of Canadians via High-Speed Internet
- aDfbrtVt 6y agoOriginal title of "Trudeau promises to connect 98% of Canadians to high-speed internet in the next few years" was too long.
- 908B64B197 6y agoSeeing how he kept almost none of his promises, probably also more accurate.
- lazyant 6y agohe's done 143/230 according to https://trudeaumetre.polimeter.org/ https://trudeaumetre.polimeter.org/
- OmarIsmail 6y ago"Almost none"? https://trudeaumetre.polimeter.org/ https://trudeaumetre.polimeter.org/ 143 out of 230 kept with 20 out of 230 in progress. Political discourse can be difficult enough without hyperbole making things worse.
- 908B64B197 6y agoInteresting to look at those that were broken. While holding a majority (so nothing holding him back).
- vkou 6y agoSome of them were broken because of bad forecasting - or they were implemented, but they missed a deadline, or one of the evaluation metrics. The 25,000 Syrian refugee promise, for instance, was broken because that number was reached two months after the stated deadline. Six billion in green infrastructure over four years turned into five billion over five years. The revenue-neutral tax changes (lowered taxes for the poor, raised taxes for the rich) resulted in a small net decrease in taxes (The Tories, who hated that tax policy should be cheering for this - but instead, they are complaining that he didn't raise taxes for the rich enough!) On the other hand, things like 'end subsidies for the fossil fuel industry' had zero work done on them. I wouldn't grouse too much about the first category of promises - especially when the CPC didn't want to take any action on any of those items. A half-assed implementation that gets most of the way to the finish-line is one thing. I would grouse quite heavily about the second category of promises. And about the mountain of corruption scandals that the Liberals are finding themselves in. All things considered, though, I would not expect this particular pledge to be carried out successfully. Expect an avalanche of money to be dumped into the laps of Telus, Bell, and Shaw.
- Tiktaalik 6y agoClip n' save for future Liberal promises: Promises that help established big corporate businesses: Kept Promises that don't: Broken
- loceng 6y agoBroken: "End first-past-the-post voting system and explore alternative electoral reform options." One of two that has over 1,000+ comments. It was only reason I originally voted for him.
- Scoundreller 6y agoWhat will be the monthly fee and/or per gb price? Giving telecoms money for infrastructure with no strings attached seems like a bad idea.
- jdofaz 6y agoI've never been to Canada but I've heard tons of stories about low data caps and high overage fees. I'm on a cheap cell phone plan that toutes that it includes 5G access for no extra charge. It so cool that I can blow through my monthly data allocation in 30 seconds :D
- Scoundreller 6y agoIn Canada, there are some 'value providers' (that are just subsidiaries of the incumbents, no real MVNO competition here) that sell 3G plans. But it would be stupid to restrict them to 3G spectrum because that's a waste of spectrum, so they get rate-limited to "3G-speeds", which they consider 6mbps. Funny thing is, I'm on the same network, and if I disable 4G and go on 3G, I get ~16mbps on my speed tests... Like, 5G and 4G save telecoms money by being more efficient with their spectrum, requiring less tower/leases and less power. Their equipment needs regular refreshment anyway, upgraded or not. But in Canada they still sell it as a more premium service.
- WarOnPrivacy 6y ago> Giving telecoms money for infrastructure with no strings attached seems like a bad idea. US is loaded with lessons like this that no one wants to learn from. eg: Bell's (later Verizon's) broken 1993 promise to deploy fiber @ 45Mbps across Pennsylvania, that netted the corp billions in subsidies eg: Anything at all with the words Frontier & West Virginia
- jacobmarble 6y agoI'm a Starlink Beta customer. I can't believe anyone is worried about the last mile any more.
- bryanlarsen 6y agoThey have to hurry up and shovel some pork to Telesat before their excuse to do so disappears in a few months.
- bitminer 6y agoThey just did. $600M https://www.telesat.com/press/press-releases/telesat-and-the-government-of-canada-finalize-600m-agreement-to-bridge-canadas-digital-divide-with-telesats-low-earth-orbit-satellite-constellation/ https://www.telesat.com/press/press-releases/telesat-and-the...
- ezez 6y agoIs there a beta in Canada available yet? Or are you in beta in the US?
- bryanlarsen 6y agoFinal regulatory approval happened on Friday. Previously Elon had tweeted that was the only thing holding up the beta, so hopefully it rolls out this week. https://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/elon-musk-s-spacex-closer-to-launching-starlink-satellite-internet-in-canada-1.5178392 https://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/elon-musk-s-spacex-closer-to...
- jacobmarble 6y agoFair question. I'm in the US, above the 48th parallel.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoEven works with a microcell from T-Mobile, so StarLink can provide IP and LTE coverage for your home (when properly equipped).
- shiado 6y agoCanada infamously has some of the most corrupt and expensive telecom in the entire world. I seriously doubt this article is accurate. It looks like Trudeau is preparing for an election with empty promises.
- DudeInBasement 6y agoWhat are they going to do, vote him out, lol
- Simulacra 6y agoCanadians don't seem to "vote" people out but rather vote them to another part of the government until they can come back again. At least in America when a politician is out, they're out.
- jeromegv 6y agoExamples? Can't name a lot of prime ministers that left and came back.
- AzzieElbab 6y agoThis won’t age well
- bioinformatics 6y agoStill waiting for that electoral reform ...
- smnrchrds 6y agoForget about electoral reform. It looks like they are going to completely botch pharmacare. EDIT: I am getting downvoted, which is fair. I did not provide any context and assumed it was common knowledge. In his throne speech, Trudeau had this to say about pharmacare: > The Government remains committed to a national, universal pharmacare program and will accelerate steps to achieve this system including: - Through a rare-disease strategy to help Canadian families save money on high-cost drugs; -Establishing a national formulary to keep drug prices low; -And working with provinces and territories willing to move forward without delay. Essentially, the government will try to make drugs a tiny bit cheaper for consumers. It does not look the Pharmacare program is going to be universal and free, like the Medicare is. But perhaps your 2000$ per month drug price would come down to 1500$ per month, if you are below a certain income threshold, etc, etc. This is not nowhere near enough after Liberals promising Pharmacare for decades. EDIT 2: The price of insulin in Canada is an order of magnitude lower than the US. Despite this, many Canadians are still forced to forego or ration their insulin and other drugs and supplies [0][1]. Reducing prices does not work nearly as well as one might think. Making them free does. > At T1International, we found that 19 per cent of Canadians with type 1 diabetes had rationed insulin in the last year; 3 per cent were rationing at least once per week. > Yes, Canada has less insulin rationing than the US (25 per cent) and at lesser intensity for sure; Americans who rationed often skip doses daily whereas rationing once per week or month was more common here. But Canada is a far cry from countries like the United Kingdom, where there was essentially no insulin rationing reported. > In the U.K., all diabetes supplies, including insulin, are covered by the National Health Service. Such is also the case in many other high income countries. Even many middle income countries, like Morocco, cover the cost of insulin for their diabetic population. [0] https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/2019/07/29/canada-shouldnt-be-smug-about-insulin.html https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/2019/07/29/cana... [1] https://www.cbc.ca/radio/whitecoat/blog/the-soaring-cost-of-insulin-1.4995290 https://www.cbc.ca/radio/whitecoat/blog/the-soaring-cost-of-...
- sleepysysadmin 6y agoRecently Musk/Starlink got approval to operate in direct competition with Telesat. Trudeau who is a strong Crony Politician clearly handing a bunch of money out. Trudeau who will very probably be facing an election shortly and hasn't issued their budget all year. The federal budget should have been out in March, that got delayed because of covid. They announced it should be out in June. That didn't happen. They announced it would be out in July. That didn't happen. It's now November and there's not even a possible announcement date right now. The reason the budget isn't out is because it's going to be very bad. The problem with cronyism is that special groups will spend lots of money to get their slice of the pie but the pie isn't going to be big this year. Those special interest groups are going to be angry they didnt get a slice.
- KMnO4 6y agoAs someone in Canada without access to high speed internet, I can assure you that the 2% will not be only extremely rural/northern houses. I'm less than 5 minutes to a city with fibre, yet my geography makes it impossible to get anything other than satellite internet ($100/40gb).
- eddywebs 6y agoCare to share which company ? Hows the latency and bandwidth speed with satellite.
- modzu 6y agoif you're old enough to remember dialup, its sort of like that.
- KMnO4 6y agoSure, the company I'm with is Xplornet. I'm not happy with them but they're the only option until Starlink. Bandwidth is around 2-5 mbps on a perfect day. Will frequently drop to 500kbps depending on the time of day, weather, etc. Several times per month I'll lose internet completely, and particularly bad storms have knocked out my internet for several days before. I can sometimes watch YouTube on 240p, streaming music isn't too bad, and browsing text-based website (ie HN) are slow but palatable. Once the monthly cap is hit, the speed drops to 128kbps which is pretty much unusable (even for text websites). Latency is also pretty bad. Real time conversations aren't really possible, but thankfully Zoom has a phone dial-in option. Here's an example: PING 1.1 (1.0.0.1): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 1.0.0.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=58 time=635.123 ms 64 bytes from 1.0.0.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=58 time=839.064 ms 64 bytes from 1.0.0.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=58 time=661.220 ms 64 bytes from 1.0.0.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=58 time=584.197 ms Request timeout for icmp_seq 4 64 bytes from 1.0.0.1: icmp_seq=5 ttl=58 time=629.539 ms Request timeout for icmp_seq 6 64 bytes from 1.0.0.1: icmp_seq=7 ttl=58 time=733.270 ms 64 bytes from 1.0.0.1: icmp_seq=8 ttl=58 time=658.290 ms 64 bytes from 1.0.0.1: icmp_seq=9 ttl=58 time=590.062 ms ^C --- 1.1 ping statistics --- 11 packets transmitted, 8 packets received, 27.3% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 584.197/666.346/839.064/78.501 ms
- gruez 6y ago>Trudeau today announced his government's plan to launch a $1.75-billion universal broadband fund to build infrastructure across the country, mainly in rural and remote communities how is this going to be distributed? if this is given to the incumbent telecom, what safeguards are there to prevent them from pocketing the money and not delivering?
- jeromegv 6y agoThe same as the government funding a road and the asphalt company pocketing the money and not delivering? Just standard government contract.
- WarOnPrivacy 6y agoThe difference being road construction is likely (presumably) overseen by a Gov agency that will hold the contractor accountable - whereas internet providers enjoy regulatory capture thru writing their own telecom laws, along with lobbying purchased legislators to place handpicked people into top regulator positions.
- 908B64B197 6y agoAs an outsider I'm not completely sure I understand Canada's vision for it's tech sector. The plan seems to be to heavily subsidize (and try to extract political credit for) StarLink and SpaceX so that existing rent seeking monopolies can price gouge customers even more. What's interesting is that with regulations around aerospace SpaceX can't and won't hire Canadians. The country effectively went 180 degree backward from the Nortel years when it seemed interested in being a pioneer in network tech to simply being a consumer. Seeing how Nortel didn't protect it's IP again foreign nations, that's probably a good thing that SpaceX doesn't hire Canadians. This pattern also extends to the rest of what remains of the Canadian aerospace sector. When Trump slapped tariffs later judged to be illegal on the Bombardier CSeries the Trudeau government simply... looked away and did nothing, allowing Airbus to swoop in and grab the plane and it's IP. Again, Canada will handle some assembly while engineering moves to Europe. Are these measures... popular with the Canadian public? Help me understand here.
- Topgamer7 6y agoGod no, we Canadians all know we are being gouged on telecom prices. Both internet and mobility. We have the CRTC (Canadian radio-television telecom commission) which is supposed to protect the public interest, however they do a piss poor job of even trying to cast themselves in that light. There are like 3 companies that control the internet oligarchy. They used the government backed fibre expansion subsidies to build out infrastructure, then claim that magically made everything more expensive. Our telecom is required to be all Canadian companies, but all their customer service is farmed out to India or other similar region call center's. We pay through the nose of asymmetric internet speeds. I hope starlink and other factors push for a price revolt.
- 908B64B197 6y ago> We pay through the nose of asymmetric internet speeds. I hope starlink and other factors push for a price revolt. But StarLink still has to talk to a ground station. I doubt they will let a Canadian customer just connect to an AT&T station or T-Mobile even if they are in range. Could the local operators even segment the territory into exclusive zones by placing the ground stations a certain way?
- Tiktaalik 6y agoThere's apparently been a massive upsurge in interest in more remote and rural property since the pandemic. As companies become comfortable with WFH due to being forced to try it out, connecting these places will go a long way to allowing Canadians to live in more remote places part and full time and still be connected to work. There's a lot of struggling 'ghost' towns out there formerly based around resource industries that are no longer viable. This could have a big positive impact in distributing more wealth to more parts of the country instead of having it all centred on Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.
- magwa101 6y agoUm, give away starlink accounts to those that qualify. Problem solved.
- Simulacra 6y agoI absolutely zero faith this will come to pass. This same promise has been made in the past, for ex. Fast promises on slow internet in the North (August 31, 2015) https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/fast-promises-on-slow-internet-in-the-north-1.3209588 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/fast-promises-on-slow-i... https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/red-tape-slowing-spread-of-high-speed-wireless-says-6harmonics-1.2848662 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/red-tape-slowing-sprea...
- alexashka 6y agoForgive my ignorance, what speed internet do 98% of Canadians have currently? Is this a speed bump or a no internet vs internet scenario? Those are two very different propositions. If it's access to the internet, that's a great idea. If it's a speed bump - I'm not interested in paying for someone else's luxury. If you want luxury - go ahead and purchase it. Also, if we're going to government sponsor access to High-speed internet, we should convert internet service providers to a government service as well. How does it make sense for tax payers to pay for internet service hardware and have corporations come in and make profit off of it?
- spollo 6y agoI can't find my sources for this but I wrote a paper about it in University. The last time something like this was promised (by the previous Harper government), they made most of their progress by redefining "high speed" to be a barely usable speed, something like 3mbps if I remember correctly. Looks like the CRTC has updated the definition again to be 50mbps down/10mbps up. Not ambitious at all compared to eg. South Korea and some European countries. But it is enough to eg. do video conferencing. So hopefully we can see some real progress. Northern communities experience a horrific digital divide due to their unusable internet speeds.
- kenned3 6y agoA few thoughts. 1) Canada's "most expensive telecom in the world" comes up a lot. While this is somewhat true, internet/cell phones are expensive here, what people seem to forget is the number of customers and the land mass. You cant take Phone costs in Ontario (Population 14.57 million, area 1.076 million km²) and compare that to California (Population 39.51 million, area 423,970 km²) and think you will pay the same rates. Yes, most of Ontario is close to the border, and in cities, but your cell phone works over a massive area and you pay for this. 2) Canadian government pledges to connect 98% of Canadians via High-Speed Internet This is the liberals, and probably gettiing ready for elections so they promise the world but history shows they also wont deliver on it. - Ontario Wynne pledges to lower insurance rates (this becomes a "stretch goal") - Trudeua pledges electoral reform (nope, never took place). - Ontario Liberals move to ban two-tier health care (2003) How long do you think Trudeau's wife waited for her COVID treatment? Do you think she was she treated in a hallway like other Canadians?
- 908B64B197 6y agoI always see these numbers thrown around and I assume they fit the narrative that most lobbyist want to push but here's what's pulled under the rug is: Density distribution, ie, how many square miles to cover 50%, 75% or 99% of the population. Sure, maybe Ontario has twice the size, roughly, of California. But I doubt the northern parts get any cell coverage.
- lupinglade 6y agoFiber or no thanks.