The digital divide down the block
TELECOM
When it comes to the digital divide, it’s no secret rural residents have sluggish Internet speeds compared to their urban counterparts.
But new data suggest there’s also a divide between neighbourhoods in Canadian cities, where residents in adjacent areas experience vastly different speeds, according to research by the Ottawa-based Canadian Internet Registration Authority.
The CIRA’s findings are based on a crowd- sourced Internet performance test completed by more than 126,000 Canadians between May and December 2015.
“There’s definitely a divide between the rural and urban in terms of speed.”
But, added CIRA project manager Don Slaunwhite, who presented the research at an Internet forum in Ottawa in June, that divide exists “in terms of specific communities as well.”
The numbers are preliminary, Slaunwhite cautioned, but further data could eventually be used to help municipalities understand where people are struggling to access Internet, where there is potential to build smart communities and where big service providers are — or aren’t — building the latest Internet infrastructure, such as fibre optic networks.
CIRA previously compared Internet speeds between provinces and cities, but zoomed in on Ottawa neighbourhoods (as defined by the Ottawa Neighbourhood Study) as a pilot project to see if it could get a better understanding of access within city limits.
In one cluster, it found download speeds ranging from 13.3 megabits per second ( MBps) in Carson Grove- Carson Meadows — just over Netflix Inc.’s recommended speed for streaming its top quality video — and 50.1 MBps in Pineview, a speed fast enough to make many gamers happy. In neighbouring Rothwell Heights- Beacon Hill North, the average was a middling 24.9 MBps, enough for ultra HD video streaming.
There were enough tests conducted in these neighbourhoods to show a pattern (74, 280 and 46 tests, respectively), Slaunwhite said, but the data represent only a fraction of the neighbourhoods’ populations ( 7,875, 6,160 and 10,695, according to 2011 census data). “The more tests you have, the more accurate your data is going to be,” he said.
The data could reflect the socioeconomic characteristics of a neighbourhood — “if people are purchasing slower packages, it’s going to show” — differences between Internet service providers, network traffic or whether a resident lives in a “fibre desert,” Slaunwhite said. While the test doesn’t ask what technology a person uses, it’s fairly easy to tell if it’s fibre by looking at ping, the round trip time for a packet of data to travel.
“It’s pretty clear where people are gaining and losing,” Slaunwhite said.
CIRA is creating an updated version of the test to ask people what Internet packages they’re using to get more information about how technology affects speed. The municipal data breakdown comes after the federal government upheld the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission’s decision to require the major Internet service providers to sell independent providers wholesale access to their fast fibre networks.
During a panel discussion at the Canadian Telecom Summit in Toronto in June, senior representatives from Bell, Telus Corp. and Rogers Communications Inc. all suggested this will decrease the return on investment and therefore could change how providers proceed with fibre deployment.
The Public Interest Advocacy Centre’s John Lawford called the threat of less investment a bluff, arguing the companies want to build better infrastructure to meet future consumer demand as technology such as 4K television becomes more widespread.
But Bell’s chief legal and regulatory officer Mirko Bibic retorted that Bell stood by the reasons behind its attempt to quash wholesale fibre sales — namely, that lower returns would force the company to slash annual investments in fibre by $384 million to suburban and rural areas in Ontario and Quebec alone.
Those curious about their Internet speed can do the test at performance.cira.ca.