National Canadian Broadband Plan

[kgonzales]

Net neutrality is not enough.

We demand and are willing to fight (peacefully) for:

1. Complete nationalization of the Canadian broadband infrastructure with 6 months
2. The establishment of a crown corporation to maintain and provide fair access to Canada's broadband network to private ISPs under the
guideline of a open access network
3. A charter for the given crown corporation that guarantees net neutrality and prohibits bandwidth throttling
4. A mission for the given crown corporation to provide 100 Mbit/s fibre to 90% of Canada homes and 10 Mbit/s wireless broadband to the remainder within 5 years
5. A constitutional amendment that will ensure that the means of communication will remains in the hands of the people, prohibiting any future re-privatization of broadband infrastructure

https://www.facebook.com/pages/National-Canadian-Broadband-Plan/113931595349292

We are going to be a strictly non-partisan organization, but would
appreciate any traditional avenues of support we can receive.

Thanks,
Ryan Oram
Head of the National Canadian Broadband Initiative

Aren't these plans fun when you don't have to pay for them? Just convince your politician to steal money and infrastructure from others to give it to you for free.

What you are demanding is theft. Just because its being done by proxy doesn't change anything.

[Ex-Cyber]

What you are demanding is theft. Just because its being done by proxy doesn't change anything.

That's right! Each company providing utilities should have to purchase its own easements from every property owner whose land their pipes/cables/conduits need to cross. Anything else is theft from landowners.

[kgonzales]

That's right! Each company providing utilities should have to purchase its own easements from every property owner whose land their pipes/cables/conduits need to cross. Anything else is theft from landowners.

I completely agree with this. Government easements rules for utilities are terrible in their reduction of landowners rights. Make the utilities negotiate and put bounties out for access. As a landowner, I would want compensation for their use of my property.

[darkphoenix22]

I believe the best kind of competition allowable in a natural monopoly like broadband infrastructure is for the government to own the cables and private ISPs to lease them and compete on price. Best of both worlds.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Access_Network

There would be too low of a return on investment for a traditional company to lay down a national high-speed network in Canada due to its low density (much like Australia). These are the exact conditions where an open access network will thrive.

A country like Korea is much more dense, making it much easier for it to be profitable for a company to lay down fibre. This would be much more difficult to apply to a significant portion of Canada without significant compromises. With a government-owned system, the infrastructure would be understood to serve a social purpose rather than a purely monetary one.

Canada is a big country. My hometown, Thunder Bay, just got 3G in December. The fastest Internet you can get there is 5 Mb/s. It is the only significant population center for 8 hours in every direction. Rogers ended up selling its service to a municipal-owned utility because it was not profitable enough to provide 3G access in such a low density area. There are plenty of areas in Canada in similar situations and they deserve world-class internet just as much as Toronto and Vancouver.

Fibre is a fixed cost. One company will not be able to build a fibre network cheaper than another. Having multiple redundant networks to promote "competition" will cost the economy more than just having one installation. Look at Wind in Toronto. Wouldn't its signal be better if it could just use all the 3G towers in Toronto instead of just the ones belonging to its network?

Competition between private ISPs through service and efficiency can still be obtained through every carrier sharing the same government-owned infrastructure. It honestly would be very similar to the local ISPs in the dial-up days.

[Ex-Cyber]

I completely agree with this. Government easements rules for utilities are terrible in their reduction of landowners rights. Make the utilities negotiate and put bounties out for access. As a landowner, I would want compensation for their use of my property.

Which is worth more to you: adhering to that principle, or actually making it feasible to provide utilities? That seems to be the choice, outside of rural areas where you only have a handful of property owners involved (and they're likely building the infrastructure themselves anyway).

[darkphoenix22]

Just asked Ralph Goodale if the Liberal Party would be willing to nationalize Bell for $11 bn. He told me Marc Garneau will get back to me.

[darkphoenix22]

Handed him my letters/posters to give to Garneau too.

[kgonzales]

Just asked Ralph Goodale if the Liberal Party would be willing to nationalize Bell for $11 bn. He told me Marc Garneau will get back to me.

Um, the current market cap for Bell Canada is $27 bn. How do you compensate the BILLIONS of dollars of pension fund and investors losses this will create?

[kgonzales]

Which is worth more to you: adhering to that principle, or actually making it feasible to provide utilities? That seems to be the choice, outside of rural areas where you only have a handful of property owners involved (and they're likely building the infrastructure themselves anyway).

Why do you assume that having the government grant the utilities the authority to dig into whatever place they want is the best choice? Why do you assume that private owners or business cannot work together to come up with a solution? Why do you assume that the current model is the best model?

[kgonzales]

I believe the best kind of competition allowable in a natural monopoly like broadband infrastructure is for the government to own the cables and private ISPs to lease them and compete on price. Best of both worlds.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Access_Network

There would be too low of a return on investment for a traditional company to lay down a national high-speed network in Canada due to its low density (much like Australia). These are the exact conditions where an open access network will thrive.

A country like Korea is much more dense, making it much easier for it to be profitable for a company to lay down fibre. This would be much more difficult to apply to a significant portion of Canada without significant compromises. With a government-owned system, the infrastructure would be understood to serve a social purpose rather than a purely monetary one.

Canada is a big country. My hometown, Thunder Bay, just got 3G in December. The fastest Internet you can get there is 5 Mb/s. It is the only significant population center for 8 hours in every direction. Rogers ended up selling its service to a municipal-owned utility because it was not profitable enough to provide 3G access in such a low density area. There are plenty of areas in Canada in similar situations and they deserve world-class internet just as much as Toronto and Vancouver.

Fibre is a fixed cost. One company will not be able to build a fibre network cheaper than another. Having multiple redundant networks to promote "competition" will cost the economy more than just having one installation. Look at Wind in Toronto. Wouldn't its signal be better if it could just use all the 3G towers in Toronto instead of just the ones belonging to its network?

Competition between private ISPs through service and efficiency can still be obtained through every carrier sharing the same government-owned infrastructure. It honestly would be very similar to the local ISPs in the dial-up days.

No, if you live in a remote area or any area, you do not deserve anything as much as anyone else. No one deserves anything.

As for resource allocation, why do you assume that the government would actually spend enough on towers to make the signal better for everyone? Government does a generally terrible job of properly allocating scarce resources without punishing everyone equally.