The Chronicle Herald (Provincial)
Working remotely tough in rural areas
Working remotely not as easy in rural areas with spotty service
Working from home can be a challenge. Take away broadband internet, it gets bigger. Add two home offices and you’ve doubled it.
That’s the size of the problem Matt Clark and his wife face trying to work remotely in rural Atlantic Canada.
The couple are just half an hour’s drive from Charlottetown but they have to take turns using the internet for work because high speed just hasn’t made it to Canavoy yet.
“Most days, she would work for three or four hours on her side, I would have to wait until she’s done to work on my side,” Clark says.
Xplornet is faster than the other available option but for many jobs, including Clark’s, “it’s not adequate enough by any means.”
On the hiring side, there are plenty of companies that even PRE-COVID relied on a large pool of employees working from home. A quick search of any job posting website these days will uncover lots of remote work opportunities.
TTEC Canada Solutions handles customer care for a variety of companies. Before the pandemic, it offered work-from-home opportunities in specific provinces, including all four in Atlantic Canada.
TTEC had about 1,000 staff working from home internationally before the pandemic, with 16 across Canada and three in Newfoundland. Now, there are about 400 TTEC employees working from home across the country.
Elizabeth Tropea, TTEC Canada’s executive director of operations, said the company’s 10-plus years of experience with employees working from home made the mass exodus from offices more manageable. Among the company’s requirements for employees using this arrangement is to have a 15-megabytes per second download speed.
“That is to ensure the voice quality,” Tropea said, noting staff also participate in video meetings, online forums and engagement activities.
If you live in a community without that level of internet service, you can’t work for TTEC.
“It’s an important qualifier,” Tropea said.
“We need to be sure that the potential new hire has the 15 Mbps of internet speed. It’s at the outset we need to make sure of that. They need it from training through to production.”
NATIONAL GAP
Recent data from the Canadian Internet Registration Authority brings into focus the gap that still exists between urban and rural areas when it comes to internet speeds. In August, CIRA reported that median download speeds for Canadians in rural communities for the month of July were roughly 10 times slower than in urban settings.
Furthermore, from March to July, download speeds for urban internet users increased on average by 25 Mbps. At the same time, rural internet speeds stayed put.
At a time when so many people are doing online video conferencing to connect with their colleagues or making use of e-commerce tools, the difference in speeds can hurt productivity and business in general.
Slow internet used to be an annoyance; now it can be a job killer, says Clark, who is also a member of the board of directors for the Eastern P.E.I. Chamber of Commerce.
“Now, more websites have more data. There’s just more data being pushed through each way. It needs a robust and adequate system to do it.”
On the tip of Newfoundland and Labrador’s Great Northern Peninsula, Nolan Pelley knows how frustrating slow internet service can be for the broader business community.
“I think the general consensus, outside of a few businesses that have fibre-op, is it’s horrible — there’s no other way of putting it,” said Pelley, president of the St. Anthony and Area Chamber of Commerce.
From debit machines to business communications, systems are slow.
“Even when it comes to businesses trying to process orders from a supplier. It’s frustrating, because it takes you longer.”
For people working from home during the pandemic, it’s not easy. Pelley’s home-based service at times is comparable to the days of dialup modems, he said, adding that’s the best residential service available in St. Anthony.
“Again, it all comes back to the local communities understanding the significant impact that having these services will have on their economy,” he said.
PANDEMIC ISSUE
In Nova Scotia, the Valley Regional Enterprise Network works with the business community of the Annapolis Valley to foster economic growth and sustainability. CEO Jennifer Tufts said internet has always been an issue in her region, specifically when it comes to speed, reliability and cost.
“The pandemic adds a whole other layer of complexity onto the internet issue,” Tufts said.
She knows business owners, workers and students have dealt with challenges during this time. VREN established an economic recovery task force to address the pandemic, and internet access comes up.
When internet reliability affects an employee's ability to effectively work from home, there are implications that go beyond productivity, according to VREN economic development officer Richelle Brown Redden.
“It just added to a greater sense of isolation and frustration, making them feel like everybody else is carrying on down the digital highway and they're left behind,” she said.
“We have a lot of businesses that are operated by solo-preneurs, and for those folks, they're really resilient and adaptive. So, prior to the restrictions that the pandemic brought in, these individuals were able to find all kinds of workarounds for the lack of internet connectivity at their home base, but with the restrictions and lockdown, that cut their access to some of those workarounds.”
Business owners and workers with unreliable internet may be missing out on networking and learning opportunities available through webinars and other virtual events. Brown Redden said those are particularly important for people with relatively new businesses.
But dodgy internet can also be a real detriment to attracting startups.
“Rural areas have never looked better to folks that are looking to leave a larger urban centre and work from a rural area,” Brown Redden said.
“For those individuals, knowing where in a community there's access to reliable high-speed internet at a reasonable cost, it really impacts the attractiveness of any community.”
N.S. IMPROVEMENTS
In February, Develop Nova Scotia announced projects to improve internet service to 42,000 homes and businesses, and in May the province announced $15 million to accelerate that work.
As of late August, $5.6 million was spent to speed up new tower installations in Cumberland and Colchester counties, projects in Elmsdale and Caledonia, and fibre optic installation across Nova Scotia.
Altogether, about 18,000 homes and businesses will have earlier access to improved service, with work for all areas covered under round one due to wrap up by the end of March. Minimum benchmarks for downloads and uploads have been set at 50 Mbps and 25 Mbps, respectively, for fibre optic and 25 Mbps and five Mbps for wireless.
However, Deborah Page, Develop Nova Scotia's director of marketing and communications, said the vast majority of projects approved thus far offer significantly higher speeds than the minimum standards.
Under round two of the project, announced in September, an additional 32,000 homes and businesses will have upgraded service by the summer of 2022.
P.E.I.
In August, Prince Edward Island outlined upcoming internet enhancements for residents. Some of the work for areas served by Bell is already finished, with jobs covering all 13 areas grouped by telephone exchange due to be completed no later than the end of June.
Xplornet is providing fixed wireless and fibre to 20,000 civic addresses. The company has already designed the fibre network and will start construction in 2021.
Both projects are supported with federal-provincial funding. Over the next two to three years, the province expects to have 30,000 households improved to 50 Mbps for downloads and 10 Mbps for uploads.
The Prince Edward Island Broadband Fund provides additional funding support specific to local internet service providers, communities and businesses looking to upgrade infrastructure.
“I live in eastern P.E.I. and I'm within the rural sector for sure, sitting in the woods, but very close to the highway where all these larger companies have their telecom lines running,” Clark said.
“It's challenging to see not a lot of progress in my community versus what's going on on the western side of the Island versus the east. Once I see poles going in the ground, it's a change.”
Clark has previous experience in the industry working with a local ISP. Given the size of the Island, he's optimistic it's achievable to better serve all residents.
“I strongly believe that there has to be a mix of both fibre and wireless,” he said.
“That's a lot to do with the topography of the Island. The company I did (work for) when I was in that sector, it was a wireless company. ... I know there's a lot of restraints, and this is really in a sense costs associated with fibre technology. Reason being is agriculture is one of the largest sectors on the Island, and if you can go to any given farm, four out of 10 farms have 100-metre driveways or 300-metre driveways just leading down to their house. That's a very, very costly endeavour just to hook up one business, one household, to fibre technology. That return on investment for these larger companies, that's why they're not going to do it.”
NEWFOUNDLAND AND LABRADOR
For people in St. Anthony and the surrounding area, internet service may follow the path taken for cellular phone service. In 2018, local non-profit group St. Anthony Basin Resources Inc. joined Bell Canada and the provincial government on a $1.4-million project to improve that service. A lot of local fundraising helped SABRI with its 25 per cent contribution to the project.
“If Bell is a billion-dollar company, we expect that they're continuing upgrades to ensure that they're giving their customers the service that they deserve,” Pelley said.
Newfoundland and Labrador Industry, Energy and Technology Minister Andrew Parsons recognizes further upgrades are needed, but he said companies cannot make a business case when it comes to upgrading services for sparsely populated areas.
“That is why the feds and the province have to be partners with these operators in making this happen, as well as private industry,” he said.
Parsons represents a district in western Newfoundland that is remote.
“We've all got these little communities in our areas that need to be able to expand their capacity and their ability to deliver what they're doing beyond just the small numbers we have in our districts,” he said.
“We've had good partnerships. The feds have been good. But you know what? We have to do more here.”
Since 2016, Newfoundland and Labrador has contributed $4 million to internet infrastructure projects valued at $54 million, with the federal government, service providers and other partners pitching in on the remainder. The last federal-provincial investment announced at the beginning of 2018 was for almost $28.5 million and covered 70 rural and remote communities, including multiple coastal communities in Labrador and towns on just about all sides of the island.
“That's a pretty decent return when you think about the investment we've made,” Parsons said.
A further round of investment is due in the years ahead. Recently, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced plans that would see 98 per cent of Canadians connected to highspeed internet by 2026, with all residents connected by 2030. On Nov. 9, Trudeau also announced a $750-million addition to the $1-billion Universal Broadband Fund. It includes a $150-million rapid response fund that's accessible now through an accelerated application process.