[CAnet - news] Quebec Government program to promote condo fiber builds

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[In the recent Cook Report there is good interview with Francois Menard on
Quebec government's Villages Branches program.  The Villages Branches
program is a good example of how governments can promote the construction of
condominium fiber networks that not only provides public sector institutions
with significantly greater bandwidth, but it also enables increased
facilities based competition , even in remote areas.  Some excerpts from the
Cook Report -- BSA]

See www.cookreport.com for the complete interview

One of the very few English language publications of the Gouvernement du
Québec describing in details the Villages Branchés program is found at the
following URL:
http://www.mels.gouv.qc.ca/lancement/Villagesbranches/VillageBranche_a.pdf 

As can be seen from this publication, the motivation of the Gouvernement du
Québec to create the Villages Branchés program was to take a bold and
decisive action for the benefit of the Québec regions located outside of the
Montreal and Québec City urban areas and to allow the school boards and
municipal institutions to gain access to customer owned dark fiber which as
early as 2002 was pretty pervasive in Montréal. The program provides a
subsidy for two thirds of the capital costs.
 
As any school board IT director will tell you, once you are operating on
customer-owned dark fiber, there is just no way back. There is nothing like
owning your own Gigabit Ethernet equipment and be able to consolidate all
your WAN in a data centre in one location across the entire scope of a
school board. Only one set of servers, no need to manage the headaches of
remote site data replication and the security benefits of a centralized
single sign-on environment. And with Gigabit Ethernet today upgradeable to
10 Gigabit Ethernet any day, there is no reason to worry about a shortage of
bandwidth.
 
By the end of 2006, according to the engineering studies submitted along
with the funding applications, 4,332 buildings be connected through more or
less 18,000 kilometers of customer owned dark fiber optics.
 
The Province of Québec has a population of just over 7 million people but a
size greater than France. This explains why the subsidy works out to about
$35K per building. 

I believe that Villages Branchés will go down in history as being ultimately
responsible for the only new addition of significantly more dark fiber
capacity to otherwise congested public support structures. Consequently it
is very important that any new capacity be made available on an open access
basis. One of the best success stories is TGVNET (www.tgvnet.ca) in the
Mauricie region, where 600KM of dark fiber is now available on an open
access basis and where local ISPs are taking advantage of the infrastructure
to link Wi-Max antennas with Gigabit Ethernet and interconnect their
facilities to those of the incumbent telcos and cablecos for purposes of
cable modem third party open access, and digital subscriber line third party
open access. The same dark infrastructure will also facilitate the entry of
ISPs as competitive local exchange carriers by making possible the
establishment of bill and keep trunks for IP traffic. 

In Quebec, a province of seven million of population, because of the Success
of Villages Branches, there are around 10 outside plant contractors and 7
engineering companies hard at work. In Canada, there are now more 184
non-dominant carriers in Canada as of this writing, many of which are school
boards as you can see from the CRTC list that can be viewed here at the
following URL:
http://support.crtc.gc.ca/tlcmlsts/default.aspx?indx=29&lang=e The promise
of sustainable facilities-based competition is slowly but surely taking
place.
 
What we have seen in Villages Branches is that support structures can
accommodate about three players. If the this player that joins the game is
not a community owned advanced fiber network then the community will never
get this kind of network because the make ready costs in proportion to the
market for a fourth player are such as to destroy the business case. 



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These news items and comments are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect
those  of the CANARIE board or management.


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