Solutions to these challenges involved many stakeholders: governments, private sector organizations, and communities. Industry Canada’s Broadband Task Force aimed to develop equitable and affordable access. The group’s goal was equal opportunities for all Canadians, no matter whether they live. Their plan also recognized broadband’s role to enable public and community services, economic development opportunities, and equal access to social and cultural benefits.
Estimated costs to achieve these goals were high – over four billion dollars – and involved considerations of content, services, and capacity as well as infrastructure. The Task Force stressed that communities should be engaged in planning broadband networks in light of local needs. The private sector could play a leadership role in development and operations, while governments could facilitate deployment of networks, services, content through their policies and regulations. Finally, the programs should be guided by considerations of sustainability, technological neutrality, affordability, timeliness, and value of open, competitive markets.
The Task Force used these principles and objectives to establish two divergent paths to drive broadband deployment in Canada. These contending models illustrate the distinctions between first mile and last mile development initiatives.
The so-called Infrastructure Support Model represents a last mile approach. It offered subsidies to incumbent service providers to extend infrastructure to unserved and underserved regions. This approach was advocated by telecommunications companies, and generated infrastructure and services that would be managed by those entities on a for-profit basis.
Critics argued that along with failing to address the needs of user populations, this model overlooked the social dimensions of broadband adoption. In some regions, it also resulted in insufficient service levels over time: once infrastructure was built, there was little incentive for the profit-oriented service providers to maintain and operate it.
The alternative approach was called the Community Aggregator Model. This public-private partnership approach more closely reflects a first mile orientation towards broadband development. It supported not-for-profit regional or community organizations to manage development projects and associated funding themselves. Ideally, it aimed to support local or regional ownership, management, and control of resulting infrastructure. It was partly inspired by examples of rural and remote telephone development cooperatives in Canada and the U.S.
The Task Force recognized that the most practical course might be a combination of the two models. When Industry Canada established its Connecting Canadians funding programs, which aimed to address how broadband would be made available to Canadians, it drew on both. The current program is called the Universal Broadband Fund.
Given the course focus on First Mile development initiatives, we will focus on examining how the Community Aggregator Model was implemented in this initiative.