Western Standard - April 28, 2026


CORY MORGAN： Alberta's rural internet boondoggle

Mentioned
Mage
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Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

201.09

Word count

999

Sentence count

70


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I talk about how the government is wasting billions of dollars trying to bring high-speed internet service to rural areas of Alberta, and why they should be doing it on their own dime, not with our tax dollars.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
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.