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Like the St. Lawrence Seaway the
Alberta SuperNet project is an
infrastructure build based on the
knowledge that bringing commerce to
the door of your communities
creates wealth.
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Alberta SuperNetAlberta SuperNet may be the ultimate application of a divide and conquer strategy.
Whenever you start to believe that the broadband dilemma is just too complicated to solve consider Alberta SuperNet.
Problem:
Privately owned networks are closed networks. If the owner doesn't have the motivation or the financial resources to expand their network to make it available where people need it, the world will just have to wait until they do.
Problem:
Publicly owned networks can't be opened up for commercial use because that would be unfair competition to the private sector.
The net result of both of these arrangements is that communities, businesses and members of the public living in the less densely populated areas of our country suffer a potentially unnecessary economic disadvantage. On the other hand forcing a variation in either scenario would be violating the principals of separation of public and corporate affairs, which we have all come to accept as being vital to the maintenance of sanity in our free market economy.
Solution:
The Alberta government in its wisdom has devised a variation on the "I cut you choose" method of establishing a fair |
Whenever you start to believe that the broadband dilemma is just too complicated to solve, consider the Alberta SuperNet.
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distribution of the private/public sector assignments of opportunities and responsibilities associated with the broadband deployment process, currently underway in their province.
This is how it works.
In issuing the tender which resulted in Alberta SuperNet project the Alberta government was declaring that the province would have a network that would provide a fibre link to every hospital, library, school and provincial office in the province of Alberta.
Furthermore every endpoint in that network would be open for a reasonable fee to any third party supplier who wished to install equipment in order to distribute commercial Internet services from those points into the rest of the community.
Having defined the ground rules for how their provincial network would operate, they then invited
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An example of one of the POP buildings
which are provided to house third party
equipment for connection into SuperNet.
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the private sector to partner to any extent that they wished in building and operating any portion of this network which they felt would be commercially viable, leaving the provincial government free to build, own and operate the remainder.
In the end there would be one network that would allow government to deliver health, education and social services, and which would be open to third-party vendors wanting to reach smaller markets that had been denied high-speed connectivity. No one with SuperNet fibre coming into their community would be denied access to the province's - or the world's - online economy.
The result of this tendering process resulted in a partnership between the Government of Alberta, Axia SuperNet Ltd. and Bell to build and operate a $295M provincial network. Axia designed and will manage the network under a 10-year renewable contract. Bell is responsible for building the network, with the provincial government investing $193M to connect 395 rural communities and Bell building and owning a $102M base network linking 27 larger centres. Bell then leases base-area bandwidth back to the province; it also has been promised $169M for the provision of provincial government telecommunications services over the next six years.
"Technically it's incorrect to say that the whole network is open to service providers.", clarified Bill Hart, media relations for Axia. "An ISP in Calgary, a base community, could not use SuperNet to reach customers in Edmonton, another base community. They do use the base network in the sense that their Internet head end, is likely in a base city, but one end of the connection has to terminate in the extended area, i.e. an area that up to now has had no high speed service."
No real project runs smoothly, and no real system or business is totally fair, but Alberta has shown both courage and insight by attempting to take control of its critical high speed Internet infrastructure, in a way that respects both the rights of the private sector and the needs of its citizens for fair access to the new economy.
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