Rural North Okanagan, BC – If you live in Rural Lumby or Cherryville you may be noticing more Telus vehicles frequenting the countryside, and for Larry MacGregor that is very good news. "We’ve just been told that Telus will be upgrading the main trunk line between Lumby and Brenda Falls north of Cherryville making the main Telus line capable of full ADSL service”, said MacGregor, who added that the upgrade will be happening this summer and represents a giant step towards high-speed Internet being available to the rural areas around Lumby and Cherryville.
According to MacGregor the giant step is good, but the work is just beginning, “Now we have to convince Telus to upgrade the service infrastructure along the new line so that high speed can be delivered to households”.MacGregor is working with a handful of residents calling themselves the Rural Broadband Access Alliance for Lumby and Cherryville. The group has been working to convince Telus to expand the company’s high speed Internet service into the rural areas east of Vernon. The effort began as a one man campaign, and was driven by the frustrations caused by the slow speed of dial-up Internet service which renders any effective use of the Internet impossible.
“There’s had been rumours for the past ten years that the high speed infrastructure actually existed here, but wasn’t activated, so finally I just decided to start asking Telus whether this was true or not”, said MacGregor who owns Landslide Studios, a pottery studio on River Road. A small group of residents emerged to help MacGregor and to develop a strategy to convince the company to activate the service. “As it stands, if I try to send a photograph over the net, I press the “send button”, and go for coffee – maybe after two cups, I’ll come back and it might be finished sending – to understand just how slow it is, I can begin sending that photo to someone 10 km away, jump in my car, drive to their house, and get there before the photo arrives on their computer”. As it turns out many residents share in MacGregor’s frustration, so many in fact that there are now over 700 households on a petition requesting that Telus activate high speed service in the rural areas and has grown into one of the most important issues for residents. “The number of people signed up continues to grow daily. I think we’re all frustrated with the fact that the rest of the world seems to have access to wireless or high speed, and here we are in the third most populated region in BC and we’re still stuck in the dark ages”, says MacGregor. Presently, most of the outlying areas surrounding the Village of Lumby and all of Cherryville are without high speed Internet and rely on dial-up service or expensive satellite service.
Ken Jeannotte is part of a growing community of part-time area residents that see dial-up as hindering certain lifestyle decisions. “We operate a business in Vancouver and we would move our business to our property so that we could live full-time in rural Lumby, but dependable high speed Internet needs to be available in order for us to make that choice”, said Jeannotte. Jeannotte believes he is not alone, claiming that many business people he meets in his travels wanting the slower pace of a rural area would relocate, but they can’t run their business on a dial up connection. Allen Haworth another member of the group, describes the problematic conditions that exist in this part of the Okanagan. “Rural areas like this, that exist just beyond the suburbs are often too remote for companies like Telus to simply expand service from urban centres, and we’re not remote enough to take advantage of government subsidy programs”, he says. Haworth added, “The fact that properties are spread out over a large geographic area and often in valleys affected by transmission shadows means that wire is expensive to install, and wireless is either too costly or ineffective because of the lack of line-of-site transmission”. But according to the group, they believe, that shouldn’t hinder Telus from providing service.
“The argument is really an economic one – most of the residents here are long-time property owners and Telus customers. We estimate that over the past ten years alone, phone subscribers here have paid the company over $4 million in phone charges, and we think it’s time for Telus to reinvest in this subscription base. Presently, we can prove that if 60 percent of Telus phone subscribers added high speed to their accounts here, an additional $3 million over 10 years could be generated for the company in additional monthly subscription fees”, said Doug Jones another member of the group. According to MacGregor, the response from Telus has been very good so far, and with the news that the trunk line is being upgraded there seems to be a diligent effort to move forward. “This region needs to become a priority for Telus, we need to establish upgrading and activation timelines that are sooner than later. It’s really the most efficient and cost effective way for bringing high speed internet to rural Lumby and Cherryville - most rural residents out here are farmers or they are self-employed in forestry, tourism or in home-based businesses, and more and more they rely on the Internet for doing business,” added MacGregor. The group is still encouraging residents to sign the petition which will be available until May 9th. Petitions are available at: The Lumby Village Office, the NORD office, the Cherryville Emporium, Franks Store, Tutor Tech Computers, Top Video, Valley First Credit Union, Huberts and Lumby IDA Pharmacy.
As of 2007, Canada’s broadband Internet network spanned 63 per cent of communities and serves over 89 per cent of our population. While this is substantial coverage, it means that 3 million Canadians are still cut off from the modern economy due to lack of broadband Internet access. If left as is, it means that country-wide, hundreds of towns and regions in places like the North Okanagan will fall further and further behind as the broadband connected world develops without them. “The federal government wants to invest in broadband for rural areas particularly for communities that are too sparsely populated and too distant from urban cores for private broadband development to be profitable – but here, the private sector may be able to save taxpayers that cost simply by upgrading and activating the service”, says MacGregor. MacGregor points to a campaign promise from Prime Minister Stephen Harper who said, “We believe that the government needs to make completing the network a priority. Strong economic development across all regions, big or small, rural or urban, is crucial to Canada’s interests, and in today’s knowledge economy, that can’t happen without broadband Internet access”.
For more information contact Larry MacGregor at 250-547-6740.
1 comment:
This is rather ironic. The 6800 to 8400 block on Silver Star Road cannot access the ADSL that runs to Silver Star Ski hill.
Telus will not run the ADSL line from the road into the various homes along this area, citing cost.
Go Figure! Yet they propose to give the Cherryville area ADSL. Must be a lot of government money to subsidize same.
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