The Alberta and federal governments have teamed up to provide 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.Access to high-speed internet has become a need for modern living as much as telephone service is. As with the early days of telephone services, rural areas lagged behind as infrastructure for services took longer to develop for them as they did in urban areas. Living in rural areas is a choice and residents in them understand they won’t have access to as many services as quickly as urban dwellers do. Or at least they should.I live near a massive urban centre but am on a rural property. Our quest for decent internet service has been long and painful. While cities have had cable and fibre optic internet options for decades now, many rural areas have had terrible provision options if any at all. At my place, we had to have a small tower set up on our roof to receive a wireless signal which provided unstable, slow internet service at a high cost. We then tried using a hub to get service through our cellular provider. That was expensive and pointless as the local cell tower couldn’t keep up with demand and the speeds were nearly as bad as dialup if they weren’t totally crashed.Despite being only 800 metres from a fibreoptic cable on a nearby highway, we couldn’t get fibreoptic services because it was too expensive for any provider to install a stub line down into our community. Fibreoptic cable is difficult and expensive to lay. It’s not like a copper power or telephone line.Finally, we heard about a new option a few years ago. Starlink was offering high speed service though it would cost $700 for the hardware and we had to go on a waiting list. We eagerly jumped on the option. When the unit finally arrived six months later, we set it up on the roof of the house with trepidation. Our home is surrounded by trees and in a valley so we worried the satellite system may not work well. Our fears were unfounded.The system was true plug-and-play. You just place it on the roof, power it up, and it automatically orients itself for the best signal. There is no need for professional installation or tedious aiming of the dish as with satellite TV services and other internet options. Best of all, we immediately had high-speed internet service and have only seen the speed and reliability of the service continue to improve despite most of our neighbours now having signed up with Starlink as well. The price has since fallen to $200 for a system with no contract.Now, let’s look at what the federal and provincial governments have been up to on the issue.Governments at every level have been promising to bring high-speed internet to rural areas for over a decade. It’s a popular promise to make, but apparently a difficult one to keep. Until Starlink came, all that most rural dwellers saw were promises and spending announcements. Most didn’t even see that because their internet was to terrible to try and surf things like news.The promised spending has been significant.The Alberta government has partnered with the federal government to spend $780 million on what they are calling the Alberta Broadband Fund. In bits and pieces, they figure they will bring high-speed internet service to the entire rural Albertan population by 2030 or so. They then break that fund up, make grand announcements like one last June trumpeting that they will bring high-speed internet to 14,400 rural Alberta homes for the low price of $10,625 per household. That’s not a typo. Only government could manage to take a service that has a $200 per household option and manage to soak taxpayers for $10,625. The announcement didn’t provide a timeline thus we can assume it will probably be a few years before those 14,400 homes actually see this new service. In the meantime, the $200 Starlink option usually arrives within a couple of weeks of ordering it. There are no more waiting times and it is available for every part of the province.On top of that, the government still has $620 million left dedicated to this project.The Starlink dishes are springing up on rooftops like daisies already. Rural citizens aren’t waiting around for the government to provide something in years that they can get in weeks. The government definition of high speed is 50mps download speeds by the way. Starlink regularly provides over 100mps download speeds. Some are claiming that people shouldn’t become dependent on service provided by a billionaire like Elon Musk. I hate to break it to them, but the government isn’t using local mom and pop internet providers. People will just be dependent upon a different bunch of billionaires. With the Rogers internet crash and periodic internet service losses due to damage to fibreoptic cables, let’s not pretend that non-Starlink options are any more reliable.Governments like to pretend they operate at top efficiency and there isn’t room for cuts anywhere. That’s a load of bunk of course. With the Universal Broadband fund, we can see an area of total waste that could be cut immediately. Nationally, that fund is worth $3.225 billion tax dollars. Sure, there are some contracts that would have to be bought out, but why dump good money after bad? By the time the government manages to string internet services to rural homes, most of those homes will have already gotten satellite internet anyway. It’s like laying out landlines to new urban homes for phones that will never be used. We need to call out and dump the Universal Broadband Fund now. It’s flushing tax dollars down the toilet that surely could be better used elsewhere.
