Broadband fast lane

Opportunity has always knocked.

These days, it regularly downloads, too. You have to be ready for it either way.

It’s almost perverse to suggest that there’s a silver lining to the COVID-19 pandemic, but one thing that there has been is a fundamental change for businesses, employees and entrepreneurs: with people working from home, and from decentralized workplaces of all kinds, geography suddenly doesn’t play as much of a role in where you have to be to do your job.

If you’re working at a computer terminal in Toronto, you can just as easily be working at a home office in Renews, N.L. — or in Margaree Forks, Cape Breton, or Morell, P.E.I.

There is, however, one important caveat: just as you need basic infrastructure like electricity, drinking water and some sort of physical location, in the wired world, you absolutely, positively have to be wired.

Fully wired: effectively wired. In other words, you have to have the kind of internet service that allows for you to productively download, work on and share information worldwide, without service bottlenecks that make anything from data transfer to effective video conferencing untenable.

For years, there has been a steady and regular stream of news releases on internet broadband improvements in this region, both from internet suppliers and from provincial governments who are supplying seed money. The federal government has also promised high-speed internet for 98 per cent of Canadians by 2026, and all Canadians by 2030.

But despite all those regular missives, that effort often seems to be patchwork and incomplete, with long lead times stretching years out into the future.

As a Saltwire Network business story pointed out earlier this week, right across the Atlantic provinces, there are areas where internet services are still painfully slow — and a clear disincentive to decentralized business growth in the modern world.

It would be a terrible shame if the Atlantic region became a model for safe, COVID-FREE dispersed workforces during a pandemic, but, outside of well-served urban areas (which are more profitable to internet giants), those inherent possibilities were dashed by poor or spotty internet service.

Consider this, from the story: “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 megabytes per second. At the same time, rural internet speeds stayed put.”

To put it in old-time Hollywood terms, when the big players come looking, we have to be ready for our close-up.

Right now, there’s plenty to suggest we’re not.