A couple of weeks ago, my wife forwarded one of those cutesy motivational sayings that she saw on social media: “If you choose not to find joy in the snow, you will have less joy in your life, but still the same amount of snow.”
It is an appropriate expression for Canadians facing the arrival of December.
And since I am writing it on this blog, you can expect that I am going to find yet another of those metaphorical allusions to the telecom sector.
As I wrote last month, there are some advocates who naively seek to spend other people’s money “to give virtually every person access to essentially the same quality of internet connectivity, whether they reside in a major city or a remote Indigenous community.”
It just isn’t going to happen. I am sorry to be the bearer of such bad news. Australia has spent tens of billions of dollars building its NBN, National Broadband Network, and it isn’t providing the same quality of internet connectivity to urban and rural communities.
Unpopular as it may be to say so, in my view, there are some basic realities that need to be faced: there are disadvantages to living outside major urban centres that accompany the wonderful benefits associated with a more rural geography. You simply don’t have access to all the same government services or private sector services once you leave the cities.
“If you choose not to find joy in the snow, you will have less joy in your life, but still the same amount of snow.”
You can complain about it, but you are likely to find that many Canadians in rural markets still won’t be able to go to the same concerts, theatre, variety of restaurants, many will lack ready access to world class hospitals, and relevant to today’s post, many will have to rely on broadband solutions that are not the same as the technology choices available to their compatriots in urban settings. Through the summer, I wrote, “Fibre optic connections arenât always the best solution for broadband.”
When fibre optic connections are set as a mandatory requirement for broadband, rather than simply being identified as one of the possible solutions, it restricts the degrees of freedom for solutions that could be innovative, more cost effective, and delivered sooner. In today’s environment, an adequate solution delivered sooner is more likely to be viewed more positively by consumers than a perfect solution delivered years later as I wrote in “Isnât some broadband better than nothing?”
Just three weeks ago, I wrote “We canât wait for a perfect, âfuture-proofâ solution for universal broadband for all Canadians. But surely we can strive to do a lot more, a lot better, and a lot sooner.”
We can moan about rural communities lacking equal access to the identical range of service options as those enjoyed by urban dwellers, or it seems to me that we can (and should) celebrate the availability of access to more than adequate broadband services that meet the CRTC’s target objective of 50 Mbps down and 10 Mbps up with an unlimited option, regardless of the delivery technology.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t always aim higher. However, an adequate solution delivered sooner is indeed better than a perfect solution delivered years later.
“If you choose not to find joy in the snow, you will have less joy in your life, but still the same amount of snow.”