Based on my research, the initial Rural Broadband Initiative only included communities with one or more of the following: a medical centre, a public library, a school, or a firehall. Since Rosswood has none of these services, we didn't make it on the list.

The Federal and Provincial governments have since expanded the number of communities on the list in order to make the telcos spend some of their surplus funds, but I cannot find a list of criteria that would determine how a community is included or excluded from the project. I wrote a second letter to the CRTC asking for further explanation, but have not yet heard back from anyone.

Assuming that Rosswood may not be included on the short list for subsidised broadband any time in the near future, I have begun investigating several other options for bringing connectivity here:

1) Purchasing a commercial Point-of-Presence from Telus. This would be the least technically complex, but also the most (by far) expensive.

Telus ' commercial broadband department sent me a quote for nearly ninety thousand dollars to provide us with a 10Mbps synchronous connection point. In addition, we'd have to pay three thousand dollars per month, and we'd also have to supply our own distribution system throughout the community.

2) Installing a bi-directional satellite earth station in the community, and distributing the data through terrestrial wireless. This is what most small Northern communities have done, and the technology is proven, reliable, and fairly inexpensive. A satellite earth station is only a few thousand dollars, but of course the big cost will be the ongoing bandwidth. Monthly cost for enough bandwidth for approximately 30 households would be well over a thousand dollars. In addition, the high latency of the connection would make it unsuitable for communication purposes such as voice or video conferencing, and of course, on-line gaming would be out of the question. Estimated setup cost is around ten thousand dollars.

3) Installing a private, high speed microwave link between Terrace and Rosswood. While not the least expensive solution, it would be the most practical, considering we're unlikely to be connecting via the high-speed fibre optic line any time soon. This solution would give us as much bandwidth as we could use (practically speaking), at a much lower monthly cost, and with much lower latencies. Estimated setup cost is between twenty-five and thirty thousand dollars, and monthly connectivity would probably run in the range of three to four hundred dollars.

Regardless of which method is used to bring the connectivity into the community, we are still faced with the difficulty of getting it to everyone's home. The community is too spread out for ADSL, which has a limited range of around three kilometres. Cablevision transmission is simply impractical, since we'd have to string coaxial cabling to every home, which would be impossibly expensive. This leaves us with wireless distribution. The best way to broadcast the signal would be to mount a repeater up on top of one of the nearby mountains that can be seen from the whole community, and have all of the subscribers' transceivers point at it. The cost for the community repeater would be around ten thousand dollars (less, if we went with option #3), and each subscriber would need to purchase a transceiver at a cost of around five hundred dollars.

As you can see, all this means that getting the community served by broadband is going to be very expensive, unless we can convince the right people that we should qualify for the subsidised connection. I would recommend that we all write to our MLA and MP, as well as the CRTC, and let them know that as a community we are expecting the same level of service as other rural areas that have been offered broadband.

The Canadian government promised broadband to every Canadian community by 2007 (of course, they also promised it by 2005 a few years earlier), and we've obviously been left out of that promise.

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Jethro Taylor