Pandemic reveals the breadth of province’s ‘digital divide’
Telus first turned on a highspeed internet connection to the Williams Lake First Nation community about a month ago, which Chief Willie Sellars described as “like the first time I was able to drink water out of the tap.”
The Williams Lake First Nation is just a 15-minute drive south of Williams Lake off Highway 97, but Sellars said the internet service they had was so slow that it was sometimes impossible to download attachments to emails.
That made the challenges of dealing with sudden demands of the COVID-19 pandemic — remote work, video conferencing community meetings, and online education — even more trying.
“You take stuff like this for granted,” Sellars said of the high-speed internet. “But you have all these rural communities that are now struggling to keep up, struggling to operate at the speed of business, struggling to get the proper health to their members.”
A so-called “digital divide” persists for many B.C. communities scattered across the province’s mountainous terrain and remote coastlines.
Almost all of the province has access to the most basic internet, but not at the speeds considered adequate to take part in modern life, which the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission has set as 50 megabits per second for downloads and 10 megabits a second for uploads.
On that basis, while 92.6 per cent of B.C. households have access to 50/10Mbps internet speeds, only about 36 per cent of B.C.’s rural or remote communities (those with under 10,000 population) and 38 per cent of Indigenous communities meet that standard, according to the province’s Connecting B.C. program.
Speaking from his own experience, Sellars said “having the tool of high-speed internet alleviates a lot of that pressure for leadership.”
The Williams Lake First Nation is one of 52 First Nations that Telus has linked to its PureFibre fibre-optic network as part of a $25-million program, which aims to connect 56 rural and remote First Nations in B.C. by the end of this year.
“We’re definitely committed to supporting reconciliation by listening and learning from Indigenous communities,” said Telus executive Shazia Zeb Sobani.
Those 52 First Nations represent 87 separate communities connected to the 50/10 Mbps standard by Telus’ fibre-optic network, said Zeb Sobani, Telus’ vice-president for customer network implementation.
She added that another 21 are connected by Telus’ existing wireline connections, but extending the service comes with challenges reaching across B.C.’s landscape.
Telus has spent $2.2 billion on its fibre-optic network in B.C. to connect 100 communities, Zeb Sobani said, 60 that are considered rural or remote. However, “geography and population density makes for challenging economics in rural and remote areas for connectivity,” she said.