Western Standard - September 05, 2024


High speed ripoff! The government is burning money on internet infrastructure

Mentioned
Elon Musk Rogers
'The Leader of the Conservative Party is scared of unions ' ~ PM Trudeau Alberta Senator elect Erik Barootes chats with Cory on Canada's Senate & Alberta's attempts to refor

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

205.25

Word count

1,119

Sentence count

92


Summary

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

The Alberta government and the federal government have teamed up to bring high-speed internet service to rural areas at a cost 5,300% higher than it would be if people just got the service themselves. It s nuts, and the program should be scrapped.

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 To the Alberta government and the federal government, they've actually teamed up on something.
00:00:03.340 And they're going to provide internet service to rural areas at a cost 5,300% higher than it would be if people just got the service themselves.
00:00:11.780 It's nuts.
00:00:12.660 And the program should be scrapped.
00:00:13.860 But let's get into it.
00:00:15.760 Access to high-speed internet has been a need for modern living, fair enough, much like telephone service has.
00:00:20.140 I mean, it's changed.
00:00:21.280 And like the early days of telephone services, rural areas, they take longer to get the infrastructure.
00:00:26.120 You know, there used to be party lines until surprisingly not too long ago.
00:00:28.920 So living in rural areas is a choice, and residents in them understand you won't necessarily have access to as many services or as quickly as urban dwellers do, or at least they should understand that.
00:00:38.960 Now, I live near a pretty massive urban center, but I'm on a rural property.
00:00:42.860 And our quest for decent internet access has been long and painful.
00:00:46.320 Well, cities have had cable and fiber optic internet options for decades now.
00:00:50.740 Lots of rural areas have had terrible provision, if any, options at all.
00:00:54.360 At my place, we had to set up a small tower on the roof to receive this wireless signal, which provided unstable, slow internet service at a high cost and terrible customer service.
00:01:04.580 We then switched to using a hub to get service through our cellular provider.
00:01:08.060 That was expensive and pointless, as the local cell tower couldn't keep up with demand, and the speeds were nearly as bad as dial-up if they weren't totally crashed.
00:01:15.600 Now, despite being only 800 meters from a fiber optic cable on a nearby highway, we can't get fiber optic services because it's too expensive for any provider to install a stub line down in my community.
00:01:25.920 Fiber optic cable is difficult and expensive to put down.
00:01:28.740 It's not like copper power wires or telephone lines.
00:01:30.880 Finally, though, we heard about this new option a few years ago.
00:01:34.700 Starlink was offering high-speed service.
00:01:36.680 It was going to cost $700 for the hardware, and we'd have to go on a waiting list.
00:01:39.700 We eagerly jumped on the option.
00:01:41.420 And when the unit finally arrived six months later, we set it up on the roof of our house with some trepidation.
00:01:45.980 Our home's surrounded by trees, and I'm in a valley, so we were worried the satellite system might not work well.
00:01:50.220 Our fears were unfounded.
00:01:51.660 The system was true plug-and-play.
00:01:53.060 You just place it on the roof, power it up, and it orients itself to the best signal.
00:01:56.140 It's almost creepy.
00:01:56.740 There's no need for a professional installation or tedious aiming of the dish like with your satellite TV services and other internet options.
00:02:03.520 And best of all, we immediately had high-speed internet service.
00:02:06.760 And that speed and reliability has only gotten better since we put it up there, even though most of our neighbors now have Starlink as well.
00:02:12.980 It's not overloading the system.
00:02:14.720 Now, it's a little depressing that the price has fallen to $200 for a system now, and you don't need to have a contract.
00:02:20.100 But that's fine.
00:02:20.660 Good for those who waited.
00:02:22.300 Now, let's look at what the provincial and federal governments have been up to in the issue.
00:02:24.840 Well, governments at every level have been promising to bring high-speed internet to rural areas for over a decade.
00:02:29.940 It's a popular promise to make, but apparently a difficult one to keep.
00:02:32.920 Until Starlink came, all that most rural dwellers saw were promises and spending announcements.
00:02:38.900 Most didn't even see that because our internet was too crappy to surf the news and find out.
00:02:42.500 The promised spending has been significant, though.
00:02:44.820 The Alberta government partnered with the federal government to spend $780 million on what they're calling the Alberta Broadband Fund.
00:02:51.060 In bits and pieces, they figured they're going to bring high-speed internet service to the entire rural Alberta population by 2030 or so.
00:02:57.480 Yeah, right up, you know, when we all go to electric cars.
00:02:59.960 Then they break that fund up to make grand announcements.
00:03:02.860 Like the one last June trumpeting, they're going to bring high-speed internet to 1,440 rural Alberta homes for the low price of $10,625 per household.
00:03:11.940 That's not a typo.
00:03:13.680 Only the government could manage to take a service that costs $200 per household and manage to soak taxpayers for $10,625.
00:03:21.540 The announcement didn't provide a timeline either, so we can assume it would probably be a few years before those 1,400 or 14,000 homes see this new service.
00:03:29.700 In the meantime, the $200 Starlink option usually arrives within a couple of weeks of ordering it.
00:03:34.300 There's no more waiting times.
00:03:35.260 It's available in every part of the province.
00:03:36.600 Now, on top of that last announcement, the government still has $620 million laying around dedicated to this project of high-speed internet.
00:03:43.040 The Starlink dishes are appearing on rooftops like daisies already.
00:03:46.460 Rural citizens aren't waiting for the government to provide something in years that they can get now in weeks.
00:03:50.940 The government's definition of high speed, by the way, is 50 megabytes per second.
00:03:54.460 Starlink's already at over 100 megabytes per second.
00:03:57.760 It's just not even in the realm.
00:04:00.040 Some people are claiming we shouldn't become dependent on a service provided by a billionaire like Elon Musk.
00:04:03.920 Well, I hate to break it to you guys, but the government isn't providing local mom-and-pop internet providers.
00:04:09.140 You're going to be just dependent on a different bunch of billionaires.
00:04:11.760 With the Rogers internet crash and periodic internet service losses due to fiber optic strikes, let's not pretend that non-Starlink options are any more reliable.
00:04:20.040 Governments like to pretend they've operated top efficiency and there's no room for cuts anywhere.
00:04:24.300 And, of course, we know that's bunk.
00:04:25.400 Well, here's an area for an easy cut.
00:04:27.340 With the Universal Broadband Fund, we could just cut that now.
00:04:31.080 Nationally, it's $3.2 billion.
00:04:33.520 Sure, there's some contracts that have to be bought out, but hey, why throw good money after bad?
00:04:37.960 By the time the government manages to string those internet services to rural homes, most have already gotten satellite internet anyways.
00:04:43.280 It's like laying out landlines to new urban houses for phones that are never going to be used.
00:04:48.120 We need to call out and dump this fund now.
00:04:50.300 It's flushing tax dollars down the toilet that, yeah, we could probably spend somewhere else for better funds.
00:04:57.200 We'll see you next time.
00:04:59.900 We'll be right back.
00:05:01.380 We're out.
00:05:02.360 We'll be right back.
00:05:03.740 Well, thanks.
00:05:04.020 We'll be right back.
00:05:04.820 See you next time.
00:05:05.360 Bye back.
00:05:06.540 Bye.
00:05:15.780 Bye.
00:05:16.080 Bye.
00:05:16.320 Bye.
00:05:16.500 Bye.
00:05:20.660 Bye.
00:05:25.500 Bye.
00:05:25.580 Bye.
00:05:26.060 Bye.
00:05:26.600 Bye.