Western Standard - CORY MORGAN： Alberta's rural internet boondoggle

00:00:00.000 lots of other things to cover as well but i'll get things going with my prime complaint of the

00:00:15.000 day so this was uh inspired the other day i saw a surveyor measuring the extent of my acreage from

00:00:19.920 the uh outer edges there and i got soft spots for surveyors i was one for 20 years so i wasn't too

00:00:26.000 concerned. It could be for a future road upgrade or something in the area. I was curious though,

00:00:29.840 so I made some inquiries. Turns out the area is being surveyed for a potential broadband internet

00:00:34.340 provider and they're checking the home locations for potential relays. I couldn't help but roll

00:00:39.180 my eyes. Our community has had companies come and go offering new internet systems almost annually

00:00:44.340 since I moved out to the country 14 years ago. And none of those came to fruition for a number of

00:00:49.320 reasons. So why do these companies keep doing it though? They never get enough people signing up to

00:00:53.380 get them rolling, but they still keep going through these processes, town hall meetings,

00:00:57.240 surveys, measurements. Well, because taxpayers are getting soaked by them through government

00:01:01.060 high-speed internet schemes. My wife and I understood when we moved out to the country,

00:01:05.760 we're going to be sacrificing some conveniences. And that meant we wouldn't at that time have

00:01:10.260 ready access to high-speed internet options. That's fine. There was a local broadband provider

00:01:15.240 at the time. They offered service. It was marginally better than dial-up and their support

00:01:19.220 system was on par with your typical phone provider, which is to say, terrible. Then the

00:01:23.440 TELUS hub came along, and for a while, you know, we switched to it. For a while, it provided

00:01:27.320 better service than that broadband provider, but as all our neighbors all started switching to the

00:01:31.460 hub as well, the tower became overwhelmed and the hub became useless. Finally, in 2021, we heard

00:01:36.620 that Starlink satellite internet service is going to become available for our area. We put ourselves

00:01:41.420 on a waiting list and spent $750 for the hardware. It took a year before the service arrived, but

00:01:46.840 when it did, it was a true game changer. We had ready access to service far superior than any

00:01:52.180 local options. Since then, speeds have only increased and the costs have come down. There's

00:01:57.480 no longer a waiting list and a person can now get a dish for a couple hundred bucks.

00:02:01.300 Nearly every home in our area has a Starlink dish on the roof. Drive in rural areas, you see them

00:02:05.480 everywhere. The rural internet service issue has been solved. Not willing to let a good but slow

00:02:11.580 moving concept go to waste though, the federal and provincial government of Alberta are still

00:02:14.980 blowing a billion dollars to bring outdated technology to rural homes throughout the

00:02:18.860 province. I understand that fiber optic internet provides faster service than satellite, but it's

00:02:23.980 only feasible in areas where there's a degree of home density. Running those lines up to rural

00:02:28.120 homes costs a fortune. Not only is the government plan sinking a fortune into fiber optic lines,

00:02:32.400 but it's subsidizing crappy broadband services too, which are even worse than the satellite

00:02:35.920 that's being offered. Nobody's going to switch to these services, but the taxpayers get to pay for

00:02:41.000 all that setup and hardware all the same. In my area, the latest government funded proposed

00:02:45.240 internet provision incarnation is called Mage Networks. They've been given 4.421 million

00:02:50.920 tax dollars to service a potential 695 homes. Like I said, we're not going to sign up for them.

00:02:56.720 That's going to cost about 6,400 a home to offer services that nobody wants. Did I mention

00:03:02.140 everybody already has Starlink? It doesn't matter when the government backstops your venture though,

00:03:06.080 does it? And it gets worse than that. In the county of 40 Mile, wireless service is going to

00:03:11.200 be set up to cover 81 homes. It's going to cost $30,555 each. And again, most of those homes

00:03:19.880 already have Starlink and they have good cell service. Oh, up north, fiber optic cables. It's

00:03:25.440 going to be run to 303 homes at a cost of $19,000 per home. And that operation is going to be run by

00:03:30.840 the Woodland Cree First Nation. Yeah, they've taken up internet management now. I can't imagine

00:03:36.340 how well that's going to go. There's duplication as well. While Mage is getting millions to provide

00:03:41.080 service to my area, Explore is getting another 4.6 million to cover my area as well. Did I mention

00:03:46.940 my area has everybody already has satellite service? This list goes on and on. Service to

00:03:51.500 Slave Lake area, $37,000 per household. White Court area, $25,000 per household. Clearwater

00:03:58.260 county, $32,000 per household. There's a link online showing all the government programs. You

00:04:03.900 can find all of these, and they're never going to be able to keep up with the technology.

00:04:08.040 Even if internet service was some sort of human right that taxpayers should be obligated to fund,

00:04:12.980 they should be doing so through the most cost-effective means possible. They could

00:04:17.140 put a Starlink dish on every house for $200 each and be done with it, and it'd be finished in a

00:04:22.480 year. Over 95% of the province already has full high-speed service. There's no need to spend a

00:04:27.420 billion dollars to provide it to the tiny remainder who have mostly already switched to Starlink

00:04:31.280 anyways. These new providers, they're going to go bust. And I know I certainly won't be giving up my

00:04:36.260 satellite service for some new crappy wireless provider whenever it may finally become active.

00:04:40.360 Neither are my neighbors going to. They may as well be stringing more cable for telephone landlines.

00:04:45.980 What could the government cut? That's a question that's often asked. Well, here's an easy one.

00:04:50.480 Of course, they won't though. It's for the same old reason. Some well-connected people who got

00:04:54.520 the contracts from these programs are going to get very, very rich from it.

Western Standard - April 28, 2026

CORY MORGAN： Alberta's rural internet boondoggle

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