Peter Emon knows the stops he needs to make along Highway 17 past Arnprior find a little bit of cellphone service so he can connect to the internet.
The Renfrew County reeve has to work these stops into his schedule in order to keep up his constituents, family and friends while on the road for long periods of time.
“It's frustrating,” Emon told 580 CFRA. “If I’m driving it means more time. You’re aware of the dead spots in the commute and you have to make darn sure you're sitting down in one spot to make that call.”
Slow internet speeds plague the 17 municipalities under his jurisdiction. Emon said the download speeds are a daily complaint he hears from constituents all the way from Chalk River to Barry’s Bay, On. Some people still use dial-up cell service to place their phone calls.
So when Tuesday’s federal budget renewed their promise to high speed internet connectivity for 95 per cent of Canadian homes by 2030, Emon said he is more confident that the county will get the connectivity they desperately need.
“It’s a cautious yay,” Emon told 580 CFRA. “We still have to talk to them about how they are going to roll out a project like this.”
The federal budget will invest $1.7 billion into new initiatives across the country to bring internet with speeds of at least 50/10 megabytes per second to rural and remote communities.
The money will be accessible to communities through the Universal Broadband fund, which will give rural communities “backbone” infrastructure that will be essential for the fast transfer of internet traffic. The budget said remote communities will also be connected through sattelite connections.
Statistics Canada will also be studying household internet access over the next five years so the government can understand the internet issues facing Canadians
The budget announcement builds on the CRTC’s first declaration in 2016 that high-speed internet is a “basic service” that is essential to a good quality of life.
The Eastern Ontario Regional Network, a group of municipalities fighting for better network access, has been fighting for this same connectivity for the last ten years in this part of the country.
Their newest public-private partnership wants to see over 100 cellphone towers across Eastern Ontario to bridge the gap between.
All in all, the project will cost $213 million - and take roughly three to five years to complete.
Jim Pine, the network’s co-lead, said the project has received the green light from the province as well as some private investors - and all it needs now is support form the federal government to get it off the ground.
“We want to improve coverage of cell networks and the capacity of those networks to do global brand across the region,” he said in an interview. “We are shovel ready.”
A spokesperson for the Ontario Ministry of Infrastructure did not confirm to 580 CFRA if the Eastern Ontario plan was already approved. A full broadband plan will be introduced later this year.
Pine said there will be a series of meetings in the upcoming days with his federal counterparts to talk more about the project.
The CRTC said in the budget they will be launching a call for applications later this year and will start evaluating projects at that time.
