Stelmach Premier's Council for Economic Strategy is a Smart and Timely Move.

It is a positive and profound move by the Stelmach government tap into some great minds and invite some fresh thinking into the future of Alberta. The Premier's Council for Economic Strategy differs significantly from the Klein era efforts in the Growth and Future Summits. Both events produced some worthwhile and interesting outcomes. But there was no real political will in those day to pursue anything forward thinking. It was all about reducing deficits and debt as fast as possible. The future would have to take care of itself as we focused only on the present fiscal agenda of the province in the Klein days.


I think the current Stelmach initiative is a forcus on foresight and that is significantly different. First it is intentional whereas the Klein efforts were mostly damage control or political response arising from musing of the former Premier. Second I assume there is positive political will to pursue the possibilities that will emerge from the PCES. Finally, the participant in the Stelmach process are past being impressive they are accomplished but also wise in the ways of the larger world and the changes that are bearing down on all of us.

There are 12 members of the PCES and they are all noteworthy and accomplished people with a range of expertise and a depth of experiences. Two PCES participants that are particularly impressive are Sir John Bell (Oxford and Stanford) and Juan Enriquez (Harvard) who are deeply involved in genetics and genomics but in very different ways. These are not the conventional kinds of minds one would by default apply to pondering the future of Alberta given their backgrounds. That is exactly why they are impressive appointees to the PCES.

I have met Juan Enriquez and been exposed to is fertile and curious mind over lunch and in other conversations. I have to admit I am very impressed with anyone who presents at a TED Conference and Juan has done so many times on a range of topics. A YouTube search of Juan Enriquez will give you a sampling of this man's mind.

Alberta is poised for a new era and ought to be leading toward that new era. We have an educated, diverse, young, healthy and prosperous population. We are sitting on the largest reserve of fossil fuel energy resources on the planet along with a stable government and easy access to the American market. Hewers of wood and drawers of water are not sustainble economic nor environmental presumptions for Alberta's future any more.

In the past this energy sector success has lead us to only consider the low hanging fruit of conventional oil and gas development. With the move to oil sands development and the synthetic oil and now synthetic natural gas coming from coal deposits we have potential for some adaptive foresight opportunities for the province. There are social and environmental consequences to growth as we have seen particularly form the last boom. A more integrated, full cost accounting and longterm lifecycle view has to become the new norm for defining progress and prosperity for Alberta.

What is also needed to secure a prosperous future for Alberta is a new mindset. That means we need to explore options beyond energy and options to look at energy in a new way, including new markets in addition to the Americans. A prime option for a new mindset about markets and opportunities is for Alberta to look seriously at India. My business partner, Satya Das, recently wrote a paper on the potential for an Alberta-India alliance you will find interesting.

I am very encouraged by the formation and composition of Premier Stelmach's Council for Economic Strategy. I am even more encouraged by its mandate to seek out and "develop ideas to ensure Alberta's continued prosperity and quality of life over the next three decades."

I see this initiative as a new pioneering spirit designed for the new times we are facing and about to face as a province. I plan to revisit the Growth and Future Summit reports but only for some background and context of past thinking. What we need is new thinking that may even be foreign to the typical Albertan consciousness. That is what I hope to see for the PCES and with men like Bell and Enriquez on board I am pretty confident that will happen.

Old Fashioned Telephone Lines and the SuperNet Last Mile Solution

There is an interesting article by Fil Fraser on Alberta’s fibre-optic SuperNet in the October issue of Alberta Venture magazine. It is entitled “Only So Super” and it is well worth a read. Fil makes the point that the high-speed Internet access has not made its way into rural Alberta homes and businesses yet. That ubiquity of service was the promise of SuperNet but it has not happened – yet!

This is because the “last mile” connection from the public institutional users like hospitals, schools and libraries does not extend to the private citizen user. That so-called “last mile” of connectivity out to the rest of us in our homes, community groups and businesses has not yet been effectively resolved.

There are Internet Service Providers (ISPs) out there trying to resolve the last mile in rural Alberta using wireless and satellite services but with varying degrees of success. Wireless is a capital intensive and difficult public policy process to put up towers all over the place, and it has technical challenges too. The latency in signals from satellite does not serve video conferencing requirements effectively and video conferencing is going to be a major rural Alberta application of the power of the SuperNet. Some are proposing fibre to the home but that is very expensive and hardly necessary for most user’s needs.

Fraser notes “In less than a decade, technology has moved communications from dial-up services to coaxial cable to wireless networks to the nearly limitless, speed-of-light, carrying capacity of fibre-optic cable.” With the SuperNet, that “speed-of-light” fibre-optic is so close but yet so far from serving rural Alberta citizens and businesses. But until the last mile is really resolved, it is still out of reach.

There is an interesting, exciting and elegant alternative to resolving the last mile for the vast majority of rural Albertans. That solution is good old-fashioned copper telephone wire. That well known and familiar technology is already in every home and business in Alberta that has a land-line telephone. The technology has developed now so you can use it connect small town Albertans to the SuperNet using the reliable, robust, cheap, and ubiquitous copper wire telephone lines - with no new capital costs. Everything old is new again!

But there is a catch. The SuperNet was built by Bell and they are responsible to resolve the last mile issue. Bell’s position is wireless and satellite are enough to resolve the last mile issue, and they may be legally correct. However, As Fil Fraser noted, the accelerating use of video and video conferencing as the new normal expectation for Internet use, means theses “solutions” are not good enough anymore.

Copper wire is a winning solution to deal with the increasing demands of modern Internet users, especially for the new trends towards video and high-definition video conferencing. Here is the catch. All that copper wire in Alberta is owned by Telus and they claim this elegant and obvious last mile solution for rural Albertans is unworkable.

In Fraser’s article Telus likens the use of copper wire for SuperNet access would be like asking them to “build another company a black-and-white TV network instead of the new HDTV network we are halfway through building.” What? I am no techie but I understand Telus uses its copper wire for its own Hi-Def TV service as well as for their DSL Internet service. What is not workable about that?

Telus is suggesting their efforts to place their fibre-optic cable “across much of the province” would require them “…to actually pull out some of that hardware and go back to copper.” Why? I understand they don’t pullout copper wire. They just lay the fibre right beside it. But I am not techie! It would be illogical to pull out copper wire if it was able to provide high speed reliable and robust Internet service capable of video and high definition video conferencing for rural Albertans.

If Telus is laying optic fibre beside copper wire why are they even trying to duplicate the SuperNet? That fibre-optic system was already paid for by Alberta taxpayers? Why wouldn’t Telus access SuperNet themselves and provide all their new services to customers on that system? Saving the capital costs of installing a parallel fibre-optic service seems like a no-brainer and the funds could be used in other ways to improve shareholder value. Am I missing something here?

There is some good news. While the Internet and wireless is unregulated and priced by so-called competitive market forces, good old fashioned copper telephone wire access is still regulated...by the CRTC. So the Internet Centre, the very first commercial Internet Service Provider in Alberta, has taken the matter in hand and has applied to the CRTC for a regulatory ruling. They have filed an application with the CRTC for Telus to provide ISPs the access necessary to their copper wire to provide high-speed Internet service to rural Albertans.

If the Internet Centre is successful then the 180 Alberta communities who currently have no Internet service can get it and get SuperNet access to boot. If you have a landline telephone in a community in Alberta, you will be able to get high-speed Internet service that is capable of handling video and high- definition video conferencing at least the same cost as wireless if not less. Don't you just love competition?

I am no techie, but I have talked to knowledgeable telecom consultants about this unloaded copper wire approach and everyone agrees that it is a great solution. I am advised that SaskTel is already using its copper wire for high-speed Internet access in small communities in Saskatchewan. One consultant told me “Just because copper wire is buried, does not mean it is dead.”

The CRTC advises that there is a 90% chance they will have their decision out before Christmas. Cost effective, reliable and robust high-speed high capacity Internet on copper wire they already have in their homes and businesses would make a nice Christmas present for rural Albertans. Keep your fingers crossed rural Alberta.

Imagine the Power of the SuperNet in Your Home - From Your Phone Line

The technological changes around broadband are becoming very interesting and exciting. Telcos and cable companies are trying to play in each other’s markets as they move to compete in both television and telephone services. This competition ought to be good for consumers in terms of service and cost - but will it?

It gets more exciting in Alberta with the additional intrigue of the publically owned and privately operated fibreoptic network known as the SuperNet. There is an enormous range of new possibilities for individual citizens and enterprises in every community in Alberta, once they have access to this fabulous 21st century SuperNet infrastructure.

The SuperNet fibre optics network cost Alberta taxpayers about $700m to install. Local connections – the so-called “last mile” (known as the “first mile” if you are in rural Alberta) was to be provided by local private Internet Service Providers (ISPs). If an ISP did not step up to serve a community then Bell would provide the last/first mile connection.

The last mile solution so far has been wireless radios and satellites. But something new is in the wind. Something old has become new again. And it can also provide another even more competitive connection option for the first/last mile challenge. That old thing that is suddenly new again is SuperNet connectivity using plain old copper telephone wire.

Hardwired telephones are already everywhere in the province. This copper telephone wire is reliable, robust, resilient and resistant to interference from weather conditions. It is also regulated by the CRTC and likely to be priced very competitively compared to the Big Three Telco’s wireless oligopoly.

This plain old copper wire is also capable of providing full motion high definition video conferencing to and from your home or business anywhere in Alberta. The current practice of limiting Internet uploads and downloads by the big ISPs is not a problem once you have access to the SuperNet. It is an enormous data pipe and publically owned and controlled to serve the public interest not just for private gain like the Telcos. Nothing against the free open and competitive marketplace but one has to wonder if that really exists in the cell phone and wireless business world in Canada these days.

Actually using copper wire for Internet access is not new. It was the norm in Alberta before DSL lines came in. By the looks of it copper wire is coming back as a “new normal.” Yesterday’s Globe and Mail ran a story on BCE who says they going to be using its copper telephone wire to provide broadband to homes in Ontario and Quebec. They are only providing the excessively expensive fibre optic cable to a limited number of new apartment and condos which must have at least 100 units to justify the cost. What is more the fibre stops at the building basement and the signal into the individual units will be via the good old copper telephone wire.

That is exactly what needs to happen in Alberta. We need to get individual home and business copper wire access to the SuperNet just as Bell is doing in Ontario and Quebec. The only difference is in Alberta the telephone lines are owned by Telus - not Bell. Bell recently said they did not see the “business case” for them to use copper wire access to Alberta’s SuperNet. Strange isn’t it that there is a business case for copper wire internet access by Bell in Ontario and Quebec. Could it be because Bell owns the copper wires in Ontario and Quebec - but not in Alberta? Remember, Telus owns the wires in Alberta.

Telus has not been playing much of a part in the Alberta SuperNet project. They lost the bid to build it originally to Bell. They have recently been negotiating with the government of Alberta on the copper wire access issue but they seem reluctant to agree. This reluctance is impeding individual Albertans from expanded and enhanced internet and other SuperNet capacity services including full motion video conferencing capacity in and from your home or business.

I will talk in later Blog posts what that could mean for Albertans economically, ecologically and socially. Yes sir – exciting times indeed, especially when you consider is was only 15 years ago the Alberta Research Council enabled the commercial Internet in this province. Lot has happened since the Internet became an everyday part of our lives. With SuperNet access pending using copper telephone wire, even more exciting times and opportunities are coming.