Is Ottawa a pothole in the information super highway? Most of Ottawa within the Greenbelt certainly is not. However, if you ask a rural business owner or farmer who has to make do with dial-up access to the Internet, you'll likely get an earful.
Some rural areas have already filled in their potholes. Consider the Township of South Dundas, a predominantly rural municipality that sits along Highway 401 south of Ottawa. Despite the absence of major population centres, that municipality is an example of how an aggressive strategy to introduce broadband access to the Internet has triggered increases in housing starts, retail business, manufacturing activity and new jobs. In fact, the drafters of Ottawa's 2020 Broadband Plan that was approved in 2003 were so impressed, they cited South Dundas's achievement as something to emulate.
It wasn't hard to impress those charged with putting rural Ottawa online, considering that in 2000, 97 per cent of the area's 82,000 residents had no access to broadband.
As of last month, that number is down to about 60 per cent, leaving nearly 51,000 rural residents of Ottawa without broadband access.
Chris Cope doesn't believe that remaining 51,000 will remain disconnected much longer. He is the driving force behind Ottawa's Rural Communities Network, or ORCnet, a public-private partnership partially funded by the city and managed by OCRI.
He's confident the 60 per cent unserved population will drop to 50 per cent by year's end.
More importantly, Mr. Cope says the city will achieve its rural broadband goal of 100 per cent connectivity by 2008.
Part of his confidence comes from the arrival of two relative newcomers at the scene. Arryba Communications and SimplySurf are both small Ottawa-based ISPs with big ideas and impressive technologies behind their plan to satisfy the rural need for speed. They are teaming up with technology giants like Cisco and Nortel to solve connectivity problems in remote areas where demand is insufficient to entice the big ISPs to offer service. Most of those problems relate to topography and distance and have stymied more traditional technologies requiring line-of-sight signal transmission and reception.
CEOs of both companies are bullish, if not downright aggressive.
At the Nov. 1 launch of new service in Vernon, Arryba CEO José González said his firm uses a proprietary design to build a technology backbone using Cisco and Sonicwall products. He says the wireless service that results "can provide up to 10 megabyte symmetrical services to customers within a seven-kilometre radius."
Mr. González expects "exponential growth" in subscribers, which will allow him to take the company public "in the next 12 months." Indeed, Arryba recently snapped up one ISP – Access TNG Network, which served the Osgoode Ward and Grey Bruce areas – and forecasts 7,000 to 10,000 new users in the Ottawa area alone within the next year.
SimplySurf launched its new service in the Dunrobin area less than a week later on Nov. 7. CEO Shadi Hussein says his target market is Ottawa and the surrounding area. SimplySurf has teamed up with Nortel and Eion Wireless to incorporate wireless mesh and "broadband backhaul wireless connectivity" using 801.11b/g technology to the desktop.
Mr. Hussein called Nortel "the key ingredient" of SimplySurf`s strategic move into rural locales and looks to mobility as his firm's trump card. "The mesh network will provide the residents and businesses in Dunrobin with broadband capabilities for video streaming, surfing the Internet and downloading e-mails with large attachments," he explained. "Residents will be able to use laptop computers or handheld computing devices that support wi-fi to access the public Internet indoors or outdoors."
Some of this talk is marketing gusto for a new product, but Mr. Cope says these firms have in fact solved the technical challenges that have so far restricted broadband service to urban, suburban and rural cores in Ottawa. "These companies have solved the line-of-sight problem," he said, making broadband available to "virtually anyone."
Robert Goliss is a senior technical support provider with Nerds on Site who is himself a rural resident. About a third of his clientele is rural-based businesses, farms and users and he said the disgust he hears among clients who do not have broadband access is "overwhelming."
Mr. Goliss also noted that, even among users who have broadband, there's angst about having no choice of ISPs. "The need for broadband in all of rural Ottawa is way overdue, but so is the need for choice for those who aren't happy about being in a monopoly environment," he said. And while the technical achievements are significant and welcome, the real litmus test for new users will be service support. "People are pretty fed up calling for tech and finding that the call centre responder is unhelpful or difficult to understand," Mr. Goliss said.
The competition will likely to be fierce but friendly. Neither Mr. González nor Mr. Hussein was willing to say the other was a direct competitor, implying that, for now at least, the unserved 50,000 residents and businesses in rural Ottawa constitutes a market that is big enough for both.
Other rural wireless efforts underway in the region include a new technology being tested in the Constance Bay area by Northwind Wireless and in Beckwith Township by Storm Internet.
By Jeff Esau
Special to the Ottawa Business Journal
