Rural and remote broadband access: Public policy issues By David Falconer, PhD, P.Eng.
Executive summary Broadband access, which facilitates full multimedia use of the Internet, is commonplace in the heavily populated regions of Canada, but is not yet available in many communities in remote and rural areas. For economic reasons, rural and remote broadband access (RRBA) requires significant public funding and support. This paper surveys benefits obtained from RRBA, successes and challenges that have been met in providing it in the past, and suggests policy issues that should guide its future expansion.
Introduction The Internet has transformed the way many people and institutions interact. As new applications and multimedia content proliferate, it has become clear that the Internet access experience is richer and more beneficial with high rates of information transfer than with low rates such as those achieved with dialed-up telephone lines. Broadband commonly refers to the availability of high information-transfer rates to and from users’ access devices–fast enough to facilitate multimedia communications (graphics, video, audio, etc., as well as text) with nearly instantaneous rendition. In short, broadband allows easy access to the full range of Internet opportunities. Minimum access-data rates qualifying as broadband range from a conservative 200 kilobits/s, specified by the US Federal Communications Commission, up to tens of megabits/s by individual users on demand. Such speeds, for example, allow for real-time, high-definition video. About 85 per cent to 90 per cent of Canadians have the potential for broadband Internet access. However, only about 63 per cent of Canadian communities have this availability. The remaining 37 per cent, amounting to about 2000 communities, including many First Nation communities, are mostly in remote or rural areas far from major population centres and are called High Cost Serving Areas by the Canadian Radiotelevision and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). Areas with fewer than about 1200 people within a five- to 10-kilometre radius from
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a broadband presence point are not economic to serve (Chouinard, 2005). Broadband Internet access has been a focus of research and development efforts over several decades. Engineers have developed efficient and cost-effective digital data transmission techniques capable of supporting tens or even hundreds of megabits/s over available copper and optical fibre media and over radio frequencies in the UHF range and above. Engineering efforts have also gone into developing spectrum-use policies and into management and control of access networks to make the best possible use of scarce bandwidth resources. The technology aspects of broadband Internet access can be said to be well in hand. Nevertheless, as engineers, we should be aware of the remaining major economic and social issues that can impact public policy. This is the main focus of this paper. The paper provides an overview of the benefits of full Internet access, the steps that have been taken and the lessons learned in expanding coverage to remote areas. It also summarizes relevant public policy issues and recommendations/guiding principles for the future. The appendix contains a brief overview of broadband access technologies that are appropriate for providing RRBA.
Benefits of broadband Internet access in rural and remote communities Broadband multimedia telecommunications can potentially give residents and businesses in rural and remote communities the same access to worldwide services, information and commercial opportunities enjoyed in large urban communities. The resulting gains in economic sustainability and cultural self-realization for remote communities are arguably more significant than the benefits obtained by residents of urban centres. In a broader context, academics such as Ramirez et al. metaphorically liken full Internet access to a “commons” for enhancing community interaction and innovation. There are many examples and case studies of RRBA benefits in Canada and elsewhere.
Among them are: s Telepresence, offered through multimedia Internet connectivity, is often an efficient substitute for the expensive and often unreliable travel that is a fact of life in remote regions. s Students in remote communities can attend high school and university classes in real time without leaving their communities, interacting face to face with peers and teachers. s Medical specialists can diagnose remote patients and, with the help of local monitoring equipment, instruct and oversee treatment. s Small businesses in remote communities can extend their visibility and deliver goods and services to an unlimited circle of potential customers. As well, full broadband Internet access makes a community more attractive for business investment. s Some government services can be provided remotely with substantial cost savings. s Multimedia Internet access helps far-flung families keep in closer contact. By giving young people access to a worldwide community, the multimedia Internet may help to reduce feelings of anonymity, substance abuse and incidences of suicide. Many First Nation communities have characteristic problems that could be alleviated by full Internet connections to the larger society and to other First Nations. Sharing of problemsolving experiences among First Nation and other remote communities can be facilitated by multimedia connections. For example, native languages, traditions and cultures can be nurtured and preserved. Inuit and other First Nation communities can present and co-ordinate their views and contributions to discussions on topics like climate change in northern regions and Arctic sovereignty issues. Society as a whole benefits from access to this native experience and culture.
Public and private RRBA initiatives Canadian federal government policy embodied in the Telecommunications Act of 1993 calls for “increased reliance on market forces for
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the provision of telecommunications services,” while at the same time “rendering reliable and affordable telecommunications services of high quality accessible to Canadians in both urban and rural areas in all regions of Canada.” In reality, the high cost of RRBA requires that reliance on market forces should at least partially give way to public sector funding and initiatives. In 2001, Ottawa established the Broadband for Rural and Northern Development Pilot Program (BRAND), which has provided $84.5 million to support RRBA service. Some 900 communities have taken advantage of the program, which decreased the proportion of unserved communities from about threequarters in 2001 to a little more than onethird (37 per cent) in 2006. About half (48 per cent) of the costs in the BRAND program were provided by the federal government, while about one-quarter (23 per cent) came from other levels of government and from communities. The remaining 29 per cent came from service providers. Continuing federal programs include the National Satellite Initiative (NSI) to extend broadband Internet service to about 400 remote northern communities ($155 million through Infrastructure Canada, Industry Canada and the Canadian Space Agency) and the Northern Ontario Development Program of FedNor, a federal regional development initiative for Ontario. Several provincial RRBA funding initiatives, such as Northern Ontario Heritage Fund programs and Alberta SuperNet, have complemented the federal programs. The provincial governments of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, in partnership with Ottawa and private servers, are on the way to making broadband access available to everyone in their provinces by the end of 2009 and 2010, respectively. K-Net is an excellent example of a successful First Nation community-based network made possible through public funding. Supported by a federal-private partnership, K-Net manages its satellite network to remote communities throughout Northern Ontario as a co-operative enterprise. A similar example of a community-owned broadband access entity is the Nunavut Broadband Development Corp., which distributes Internet service to 25 territorial communities. As a result, the company says that Nunavut has
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one of the highest Internet penetration rates in Canada. The 2006 federal Telecommunications Policy Review Panel reinforced the commitment to extend Internet access to all regions when it recommended that Ottawa ensure broadband services “are available in all regions of Canada, including urban, rural and remote areas, by 2010 at the latest.” The panel added that “federal government policy should recognize that market forces will not on their own achieve policy objectives of deploying ubiquitous broadband access by 2010, particularly in rural and remote areas.” The 2009 federal budget allocates $225 million over three years to develop and implement a strategy to encourage the private development of broadband access to all remaining unserved communities, beginning in 2009-2010. Another potential source of funds for large incumbent local exchange carriers like Bell and Telus to expand their broadband services to remote communities exists in “deferral accounts” mandated by the CRTC. In 2006, and strengthened by further rulings in 2008, the CRTC ordered major incumbent service providers to use half of the deferral account funds (more than $300 million) to extend broadband access to the so-called High Cost Serving Areas. The deferral accounts grew from telecom customer payments in lieu of price cuts following the 2002 opening up of telecom markets to full competition. This use of the deferral account monies has been challenged by consumer groups, that want the entire amount to be rebated to customers, and also by Bell and Telus, which would prefer that a greater share go to expanded RRBA services and to improved access for disabled customers. The cases were heard in March 2009 by the Supreme Court of Canada, which is considering its ruling. Expansion of broadband Internet access into rural and remote areas is also occurring or planned internationally, including in many developing countries. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) paints a fairly optimistic picture of international RRBA growth and challenges the notion that remote service is always more expensive than serving urban markets. However, this finding is likely coloured by examples from relatively small
countries, where distances between rural communities and main Internet hubs are small. The OECD report emphasizes the helpful role of private sector investment, but also recommends that governments ensure that expansion is carefully planned, with adequate economic assessments, support and training. It should be noted that equipment and technical and policy experience developed for expanding remote broadband service in Canada has high potential for export to other countries. A positive example of broadband rural expansion stimulated by government investment is in Sweden, which has one of the world’s highest rates of Internet availability and use, slightly ahead of Canada’s. The Swedish government developed a strategic policy for information technology as early as 2000, when it mandated the state-owned electric utility to build an optical fibre backbone network to reach nearly all municipalities by 2004. The government then funded regional and local networks to connect to the backbone and provide distribution to individual subscribers, mainly by DSL and radio technologies. Municipalities were required to contribute to the cost and to choose independent operators to run their networks. Skanova, a private firm, operates the overall backbone network and provides full connection to the independent local service providers without competing with them in any way. By 2007, there were fewer than 70 remote Swedish communities of 50 to 200 inhabitants without some form of broadband access. Interestingly, the proportions of investments from the national, regional and community governments (including, in this case, the European Union) and from service providers were almost the same as those in the Canadian BRAND program. (The overall investment in the 2001 to 2007 period was roughly $1 billion in each country’s initiative.) It is also worth noting that rural broadband access funding, amounting to US$7.2 billion, is part of the recent US stimulus package.
Challenges and lessons learned from existing RRBA initiatives Broadband Internet access must not only be available in remote communities, but must be sustainable and affordable. Operational and maintenance costs can be a challenge and must be carefully addressed in designing the
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appropriate mix of public and private investment, as well as user fees. One key way to sustain public support is for government to publicly recognize that remote broadband access is an essential service that enhances the lives and opportunities of individuals and families. A case can also be made that using remote broadband access to provide public services, such as education and health care, along with some administrative and judicial functions, is one way to allow governments to partially subsidize overall delivery costs, making other individual, community and private services more affordable. Once broadband access is available in a remote community, at reasonable costs to its residents, the benefits are strongly felt. In a final assessment of the recently concluded BRAND program, the response of users in remote and rural communities was overwhelmingly positive. Ninety per cent of the program’s recipients indicated that broadband access was essential and that there would be adverse impacts in their communities if the service were withdrawn. The top-ranked community needs that broadband provided were education, health services, community access, population retention and tourism stimuli, along with economic development and employment. It is also important to ensure that remote broadband services fully meet community needs. A government-sponsored BRAND evaluation demonstrates the value of a bottom-up approach, in which community needs rather than service providers or government bureaucrats play the dominant role in designing the RRBA investment (Industry Canada Audit, 2006). Local advisory committees and well-trained local community service support staff have also been found to be critical to the successful networks operated by K-Net and the Nunavut Broadband Development Corp. Experience has also shown that tailoring community-relevant content and targeted training of users, especially small businesses, in remote communities should be provided and appropriately supported (Odasz, 2009; ABCtech, 2008). The Community Access Program administered by Industry Canada can provide remote communities with the resources and training to exploit new information and communication technologies. As well, pre-education of residents in some remote communities with may be 6OLUME s .O \ *ULY
necessary to acquaint them with the potential economic and social benefits of full multimedia Internet access (Burton and Hicks, 2005). Valuable lessons can be learned from setting up remote broadband access such as Alberta’s SuperNet, a backbone and distribution broadband network established in 2002 to provide access to almost 500 rural communities. (It involves numerous service providers co-ordinated by Axia, a private entity.) A 2008 SuperNet status report points to problems as well as successes (ABCtech, 2008). Among the concerns are unrealized advantages for many residential and small-business users, service deficiencies and a lack of local leadership. The report suggests that the design of the network was top down, applying an “if we build it, they will come” approach, with insufficient local community involvement and leadership, in contrast to the bottom-up approach suggested by the BRAND and K-Net experiences. The SuperNet status report also notes the importance of identifying and matching community needs with the new opportunities available from enhanced Internet access. Another example of potential problems, perhaps also related to a top-down approach, is gleaned from a recent analysis of the US federal rural broadband expansion program, part of its recent American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan (U.S.D.A. audit, 2009). Loan funding for broadband expansion has in some cases been directed to already well-serviced areas. This problem likely arises from a combination of the top-down approach and an urgency to spend budgeted funds with insufficient planning. A potential further challenge to further coverage is that as the number of remote Canadian communities whose residents lack broadband Internet access dwindles, the more difficult and expensive it will be to serve them. In effect, the “low and mid-hanging fruit” has been picked.
Public policy impact Funding, local ownership and governance From the foregoing discussions, it is clear that extending full (broadband) Internet access to remote regions is an essential means to ensure equal economic, social and cultural opportunities everywhere. It is also clear that there is little economic incentive for private sector vendors alone to extend their networks to these areas. Public sector financing must play a major role.
In a typical RRBA initiative, the physical infrastructure is financed by a combination of government and private sector funds; the private sector funds are offered with the expectation of profit from down-the-road Internet service provision. This scenario is descriptive of community networks set up under BRAND and of the Swedish experience. In some cases, there is a community nonprofit organization that runs the service or leases its operation to private concerns. Such is the case with K-Net, where the non-profit K-Net operates the satellite network while it leases operation of the terrestrial networks to commercial service providers. However, K-Net maintains overall governance. In any case, it makes sense to separate publicly funded network infrastructure from competitively funded services. This encourages a healthy competitive environment for service provision, unhampered by long-term debt incurred from the initial capital investment. An extreme vision of the community-based network scenario is offered by Ramirez et al.’s view of the Internet as a tool for social development, likening it to a village commons for the exchange of ideas and promoting innovation. This utopian prescription is seen as only being possible with full community ownership and control of Internet access, whether it is in urban, suburban, rural or remote areas of Canada. Further elaboration of this vision is found in documents available on the Telecommunities Canada home page, www.tc.ca. Clearly, local access networks in remote areas may be set up and financed in different ways, largely depending on the extent to which the community wants to design and control its access to the Internet. Government funding policy should be flexible enough to accommodate diverse approaches for implementing and managing broadband Internet access. At the same time, the business plans must be sound, plans for sustainability–in some cases likely requiring continuing government subsidy– must be in place, and each community must have a realistic vision of how the Internet access will be used and how it will benefit the community. The impetus for full community Internet access must be bottom up, rather than top down. Adequate training and support is also a hallmark of successful community Internet access. The federal government’s Community 17
Access Program (www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/cappac.nsf/eng/00006.html) provides a good basis for generating such support. How broad should broadband be for remote users? Narrowband (i.e. about 50 kilobits/s) Internet access, typically using dialed-up telephone modems, is adequate for short text email messages. Two to three megabits/s is adequate for occasional downloading and uploading of fairly large documents and photographs, short video and real-time audio signals, moderate-quality visual meetings, and reasonably quick viewing of Internet pages, etc. It is equivalent to what many in large cities currently get. Higher speeds of five to 10 megabits/s are better suited for applications like remote medical examinations, viewing and participating in school classes and meetings, and for entertainment applications, such as movie downloads, multimedia gaming, etc. For many residents and small businesses, the two- to three-megabits/s level of service is sufficient and is a reasonable goal as an average user rate in remote areas. Community centres, schools, municipal offices and local medical facilities can benefit from the higher speeds. More exotic applications, such as 3-D holographic image projection, would require even higher data speeds and may be hard to justify. The need for faster Internet access will increase gradually from present levels, and the capability for data-rate upgrading should be an ingredient of any new access infrastructure. When digital subscriber loop and digital cable technologies were developed for broadband access, the prevalent assumption was that people would use this access mainly to download large files, such as videos, and that uplink messages (from users to hubs and to other parts of the Internet) would mostly be short. The transmission technologies were designed accordingly, with high downlink and low uplink bandwidths. In recent years, however, users are increasingly creating and transmitting large files, graphics, videos, etc. Newer transmission technologies are allowing for symmetric uplink and downlink bandwidths and/or flexible sharing of bandwidth between uplink and downlink. This symmetry and flexibility should be a necessary feature of any RRBA infrastructure. 18
The provisioning of bandwidth for a given community (determining and specifying the required aggregate local needs) is a topic that is not pursued here. However, it should be pointed out that, increasingly, Internet traffic will be among things, rather than among people. The number of possible unique Internet addresses will be so large that all kinds of everyday objects and sensors can have their own addresses and can communicate with one another to request service, report on conditions they sense, adapt themselves to the needs of humans and of other devices, etc. It is likely that future Internet use will require less conscious human/machine interaction than at present and will thus be largely invisible to humans. It is still likely that the largest bandwidth applications will be in videos and other large files for human viewing and most individual device-to-device transmissions will consume relatively low bandwidth. However, the number of such low bandwidth Internet accesses by devices will be enormous. Rural and remote broadband access as a part of a national strategy for information and communications technology A broader policy question is: Should extension of broadband Internet services to remote areas be part of a national information and communications technology strategy? Many other countries have such a strategy; Canada does not. When looked at in the light of other nation-binding tools, such as railroads, airlines, highways, broadcasting and, indeed, telecommunications, a national strategy and even a new federal “Department of Information and Communications” makes sense. It is one of the recommendations made recently by Telecommunities Canada and others (Ramirez et al). The notion of a national information and communications technology strategy is further strengthened by the fact that what we know as the traditional telecommunications network, in which individual “calls” occupy a specific circuit for their duration, is giving way to an Internet protocol-based network, in which calls are transported as short packets, at irregular time instants, before being reconstructed with the right timing at the receiving end. In effect, the traditional telecommunications functions are carried out as a small part of the traffic on the Internet.
Summary Broadband Internet access should, as a matter of national policy, be available to all rural and remote regions in Canada. Full ubiquitous Internet coverage levels the economic playing field between urban and remote communities, and enhances and equalizes the social fabric of the nation. First Nation communities, especially in remote regions, are among the foremost beneficiaries of RRBA. Local community needs must be well defined and addressed in creating RRBA business plans. A bottom-up approach, with community leadership as the impetus, is vital. There must be adequate training and on-site support for Internet users in remote communities. Government (federal, provincial, local) funding is necessary, in partnership with private sector service providers. Fortunately, federal and provincial government budgeting is being provided for expansion of RRBA, and there is the further possibility of private sector funding from the CRTC-mandated deferral accounts. Several possible modes of control and ownership of local Internet access have been found successful, depending on the community resources and will. Incentives for private sector operators to offer service in remote areas are facilitated by the separation of long-term publicly funded infrastructure from investments in service and applications. Finally, we have repeated the call for the formation of a strategic national policy for information and communications technologies, within which RRBA is a vital segment.
Acknowledgements It is a pleasure to acknowledge fruitful discussions and information from Gérald Chouinard of the Communications Research Centre, and Frances Abele and Chris Turnbull of the Carleton Centre for Community Innovation.
Hold that date! The next presentation in the centre’s Policy Engagement Series will be on October 29 in the legislative building at Queen’s Park. The speaker will be Jatin Nathwani, PhD, P.Eng., who is a professor and the Ontario research chair in public policy and sustainable energy management in the faculties of engineering and environment at the University of Waterloo.
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References ABCtech Rural Broadband Working Group. “Alberta rural broadband–Status report.” June 2008. 74.125.113.132/search?q=cache:llhdbATYgcJ:www.abctech.ca/uploads/files/Documents/Alberta20Rural20Broadband20-20FINAL. pdf+Alberta+rural+broadband&cd=1&hl=en& ct=clnk&gl=ca. Bird, John. “Federal cash to broaden Nunavut bandwidth, NDBC hopes.” Nunatsiaq News. Feb. 13, 2009. Burton, M.L. and M.J. Hicks. The residential and commercial benefits of rural broadband: Evidence from central appalachia. Huntington, W.V.: Center for Business and Economic Research, Marshall University, 2005. www.marshall.edu/ cber/research/broadband/Final%20Rural%20 Broadband%20July%202005.pdf. Chouinard, Gérald. “Rural and Remote Broadband Access Program–Third-year report, 2004-2005.” Communications Research Canada. Ottawa, 2005. www.crc.ca/files/crc/home/research/rrba/RRBA_Annual_Report05-e.pdf. CRTC Decision 2006-9. “Disposition of funds in the deferral accounts.” Ref. 8678C12-200402313 and 8678–B2-200318049. Ottawa. Federal Communications Commission. “What is broadband?” online. www.fcc.gov/ cgb/broadband.html. Fiser, Adam and Andrew Clement. “The KNet Broadband Deployment Model.” Faculty of
Information Studies. University of Toronto, May 2007. kmdi.utoronto.ca/broadband/publications/Files/fiser_paper.pdf. Industry Canada Audit and Evaluation Branch. “Formative evaluation of the Broadband for Rural and Northern Development Pilot.” Ottawa, July 2006. www.ic.gc.ca/eic/ site/ae-ve.nsf/eng/01425.html. Matear, Maggie. “Canada must make broadband infrastructure a priority.” Canadian Journal of Communication. Vol. 27 No. 4. 2002. www.cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/ viewArticle/1322/1375. Malindi, Phumzile and Toriq Kahn. “Enabling broadband rural networking.” Presented at Third International Conference on Broadband Communications. Pretoria. Nov. 24, 2008. Nicholson, Chris. “Bringing the Internet to remote African villages.” New York Times. Feb. 2, 2009. Odasz, Frank. “The rural broadband challenge: Use it.” Daily Yonder. Feb. 6, 2009. www.dailyyonder.com/print/1905. OECD Directorate for Science, Technology and Industry. “The development of broadband access in rural and remote areas.” Report DSTI/ICCP/ TISP(2003)7/FINAL. May 10, 2004. Available through www.ingentaconnect.com. Ramirez, Ricardo et al. “Broadband for what? Policy implications of an essential public utility.” Knowledge Media Design Institute
paper, January 2007. kmdi.utoronto.ca/broadband/publications/Files/ramirez_paper.pdf. St. Arnaud, Bill. “Quebec government to promote condo fibre builds.” CA-Net News. Oct. 30, 2005. lists.canarie.ca/pipermail/ news/2005/000145.html. Statens Offentliga Utredningar SOU 2008:40. Bredband till hela landet. (Swedish government report). April 18, 2008. www.regeringen.se/ sb/d/108/a/103376. Stevenson, C.R. et al. “IEEE 802.22: The first cognitive radio wireless regional area network standard.” IEEE Communications Magazine. January 2009: 130-138. Telecommunities Canada. “A representation from Telecommunities Canada with respect to: Order under section 8 of the Telecommunications Act–Policy direction to the Canadian Radiotelevision and Telecommunications Commission.” June 17, 2006. Telecommunications Policy Review Panel. Final report. Ottawa: March 2006. US Department of Agriculture. Office of the Inspector General, Southwest Region. “Audit report: Rural utilities service broadband loan and loan guarantee program.” Report 09601-8-Te. Washington: March 2009. Zhang, Mingliu and Richard Wolff. “Crossing the digital divide: Cost-effective broadband wireless access for rural and remote areas.” IEEE Communications Magazine. February 2004: 99105. www.coe.montana.edu/ee/rwolff/Dividerev4.pdf.
Inaugural public policy conference tackled tough issues Amit Chamka, PhD, president of the University of Western Ontario (right), engages in discussion with attendees of the centre’s 2009 public policy conference. Chakma spoke about the policy challenges of increased complexity. The highly informative presentations covered a range of important topics including the Green Energy Act, water safety in Ontario since Walkerton, and how engineers can gain access to the corridors of power at Queen’s Park.
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Appendix This appendix briefly surveys the access technologies from which service providers can choose to provide broadband service in remote communities. There is first the problem of backhaul–connecting local hubs in remote communities with large Internet hubs. The backbone networks interconnecting large population centres are mainly optical fibre-based. Such fibre backbones have spread into rural areas through Alberta’s SuperNet, Quebec’s “Villages branchés” and in Sweden. However, for many remote communities in Canada, radio backhaul would be far more cost effective, either with terrestrial line-of-sight microwave links or with Very Small Aperture satellite links. The latter technology, which has been largely pioneered in Canada, is especially relevant for communities in the far north (Chouinard, 2005). The most common media for local distribution to subscribers in urban and suburban areas are digital subscriber lines (DSL) and digital coaxial cables. DSL runs on regular telephone loops, provided that the loops’ distances to the central office are less than four kilometres. Digital cable shares cable television distribution facilities, where these exist. Either of these access technologies typically can provide downlink data rates of one to 10 megabits/s for relatively densely populated parts of communities, where sufficiently short, high-quality telephone and/or TV cable plants exist. Maximum uplink data rates are slower in the most commonly deployed versions of DSL and cable. Optical fibre is the ultimate access medium, with hundreds of megabits/s capability. It is part of some new subdivisions, but is very expensive to install as a replacement for existing copper media or for distribution in rural areas. For remotely situated subscribers, and even for some urban subscribers, wireless (radio) technologies are most economical for local access, since they do not require wires or cables to be in place over long distances. The wireless local area network IEEE standard 802.11, available in several versions, and popularly called WiFi, is widely used for ad hoc Internet access over short distances. It can be adapted for longer ranges for use in rural areas. WiFi uses the unlicensed radio spectrum, mainly in the 2.4 GHz and 900 MHz bands, based on a spectrum-sharing protocol. Data rates available from it diminish significantly with large numbers of users. A wireless standard designed for longer ranges is IEEE 802.16, popularly called WiMAX. It can use the licensed or unlicensed spectrum and generally provides more consistent service for subscriber populations, at higher cost than WiFi, but with greater range and reliability. A currently emerging wireless standard, which is specifically targeted for rural and remote use, is IEEE 802.22. It is de-
signed to share spectrum with VHF and UHF digital television (as analog over-the-air television is phased out) and wireless remote devices such as wireless microphones. IEEE 802.22 is developed to be used as unlicensed radio technology, and “sharing” means that the system avoids causing interference by sensing and/or learning by a database lookup. The VHF/UHF television spectrum is advantageous since it offers better radio propagation properties (longer range and robustness to obstacles) than the spectrum used by WiFi, WiMAX and most other candidate wireless technologies. UHF is also well suited to rural and remote regions, which tend to have vacant VHF and UHF television channels available. Finally, among available radio technologies are forms of cellular radio, in particular the so-called third-generation and emerging fourth-generation systems. The latter, exemplified by a soon-to-appear technology called 3GPP-LTE (third generation partnership long-term evolution) can deliver several megabits/s to and from mobile or stationary subscribers. Like all cellular radio standards, it requires base stations spaced at intervals of several kilometres. This fourth-generation system has the advantage of mobility and ubiquity (almost everyone these days has a cellphone, and service has been steadily advancing into rural areas), but at the cost of restriction to radio frequencies above 800 MHz–and hence lower coverage range. Further information on access technologies and their challenges can be found in presentations and reports from the RRBA research program conducted at the Communications Research Centre (www.crc.ca/rrba).
David Falconer, P.Eng., received his B.A.Sc. degree in engineering physics from the University of Toronto and SM and PhD degrees in electrical engineering from MIT. After a year as a postdoctoral fellow at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, he worked with Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, NJ, from 1967 to 1980. (In 1976/1977, Falconer was a visiting professor at Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden.) Since 1980, Falconer has been with Carleton University, where he is now a professor emeritus and distinguished research professor in the department of systems and computer engineering. Falconer’s current research interests centre on beyond-third-generation broadband wireless communications systems. He was director of Carleton’s Broadband Communications and Wireless Systems (BCWS) Centre from 2000 to 2004. From 2002 to 2004, he was also a member of the CRC Steering Committee for Rural and Remote Broadband Access. Falconer chaired the Working Group 4 (new radio interfaces, relay-based systems and smart antennas) of the Wireless World Research Forum in 2004 and 2005. An IEEE life fellow, he recently received two honours from that international association, which is dedicated to the advancement of technology. In 2008, Falconer received its Canadian Award for Telecommunications Research and, in the following year, he won the IEEE Canada 2009 Fessenden Award (Telecommunications). In June, Falconer received an honorary doctor of science from the University of Edinburgh.
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