Should the City of St. Albert get into the high-speed Internet broadband business?
City staff were looking for direction on what potential ideas require more research during Monday’s standing committee of the whole meeting.
Council members were happy to affirm that the directions already being taken when it comes to the municipal networking, public WiFi and residential Internet work were fine with them. Those directions include everything from investing in municipal needs to advocating with the telecommunications industry for residential Internet speeds.
But the question mark is around available broadband speeds and fibre networks for the businesses of St. Albert and how far the city should go in trying to ensure businesses have the access they need.
The spectrum presented by staff ran from doing nothing all the way to starting a City of St. Albert Internet business, essentially turning high speed broadband access into a public utility.
Council members didn’t agree to any of these steps just yet, but did give a range of feedback for staff to consider when exploring the options.
On the far side of the spectrum, Mayor Nolan Crouse said he wanted some more information on the idea of the Internet being run as a public utility, adding he’s not sure he understands the concept enough to rule it out at this point.
“We enter into the free market once in awhile,” Crouse said, noting the example of the city buying a Starbucks franchise for Servus Place. “I’m really interested in the utility model.”
Within Alberta, the Town of Olds has entered into that realm with the O-Net service, which offers products with speeds that range up to 1,000 megabytes per second for both downloading and uploading speeds.
Coun. Cathy Heron said she wanted to see more work around the whole spectrum of options, from advocacy to the utility, but said her preferred model would be to run dark fibre, which would see fibre installed and some used for municipal purposes while other strands could be possibly licensed to other public sector or maybe private sector organizations.
She noted recent smart city and municipal conferences where there have been discussions on whether or not access to broadband is a human right.
“It’s pushing it to call it a human right in my opinion,” she said, but she thinks it is on the cusp of being an essential service.
Others on council were interested in a less city-involved approach to business solutions and wary of venturing into the realms occupied by private business.
Coun. Tim Osborne said his comfort level sits more at the city taking on a facilitation or low-cost partnership role.
“There are people that are willing to help solve this problem for us,” he said, also noting technology can change fast and it is the business of telecommunications companies to keep up with those changes.
Coun. Bob Russell said he endorsed what Osborne said.
“We don’t have to solve problems for providers,” Russell said.
Councillors Wes Brodhead, Sheena Hughes and Cam MacKay also were leaning towards allowing private business to look after the issue, while recognizing there are some connectivity issues in St. Albert’s business parks.
Dean Bradko with Pro-Western Plastics attended the meeting and explained the company’s struggles to find a provider that can offer the needed capacity in Riel Business Park.
Upload speeds in particular can be a challenge, he told council.
“It’s really tough and it’s something we have to spend a lot of time and money actively managing,” he said. The company could pursue its own solution, he noted, but that wouldn’t benefit the others struggling in Riel with Internet speeds.
The topic of municipal broadband also drew Dar Schwanbeck, managing director of the Northern Alberta Business Incubator (NABI), to the meeting.
He suggested council should lean more towards wireless solutions, which he hopes might be cheaper, as well as noting that NABI has started offering some wireless services.
Resident Mike Killick also came to give his two cents to council, saying he doesn’t support the idea of getting involved in business Internet.
He pointed out the speed test data included in the report only had 210 participants, and only about 132 of those were residential, while the rest were from businesses.
Businesses should stick to providing business services, not the city, he said. “Once we get into this dark fibre business, where does it end?” Killick asked.
