KEMPTVILLE - An "agriculture cluster" has been formed to study and promote Internet use in the Leeds-Grenville farm community following a meeting at Upper Canada Network’s office here Wed., Jan. 17.
The group, which sprang out of a meeting of representatives of about a dozen farm groups from the two counties, met again Tues., Feb. 13 to examine how the farm community uses the Internet and where its emphasis should lie, whether it should encourage better rural phone service, high speed Internet connectivity or training on what already exists.
The meeting was called by UCNet and was led by its rural facilitator, Howard Giles, as farm groups were approached to determine the need for UCNet’s high speed wireless service, which is now in the pilot stage in Kemptville. Similar meetings had already been held with clusters representing education, industry, tourism and small business representatives
UCNet is a not-for-profit corporation based in the EBI building just south of here. It has taken on the task of providing affordable high speed wireless Internet communications in under-serviced rural Leeds-Grenville. The project grew out of the Upper Canada Economic Renewal Project, launched in south Grenville in 1998.
Headed by Chief Executive Officer and vice-chair Vic Allen and chair Peter White, UCNet took over offices in the EBI building in April of last year after having received $1.8-million in provincial Telecommunications Access Partnerships (TAP) funding, an amount that must be matched for the corporation to continue operating, Allen told the group of farm representatives.
"We’re all about jobs," Allen said, in outlining how high speed Internet will permit under-serviced areas to participate fully in the new high tech economy.
He likened broad band Internet service to the completion of Highway 416 in its potential for jobs in Leeds-Grenville.
Allen was recently appointed to the National Bandwidth Taskforce, which is studying means to bring high speed Internet access across the country and pointed out Jan. 17 that it is an urban-centered body with little appreciation for the problems faced by rural Canadians, who are under-serviced by such traditional Internet providers as telephone companies.
Rural Canada, to many taskforce members, means anything outside a city and he and other rural members are trying to have it stratified into different segments, for instance satellite communities like North Grenville, agricultural units and remote areas, like Nunavut.
The federal government has set 2004 as the year in which it wants to see all of Canada connected to the Information Highway and this province’s Connect Ontario initiative is designed to put up interactive municipal web sites, or portals in high-tech parlance, so that taxes can be paid on-line, municipal services like dog licences can be purchased through the Internet and building codes and applications accessed through web sites.
But first rural Ontario has to be connected at speeds which make these services accessible and that’s where initiatives like Upper Canada Networks’ come into play.
UCNet’s plans call for an infrastructure of towers that would make high-speed wireless available at affordable rates through Leeds-Grenville.
The pilot project now under way in Kemptville has Kemptville College, North Grenville District High school and Kemptville hospital set up as clients, each being fed with high speed service from Ottawa via a tower south of the community. It can provide T-1 speed - 1.54-megabits per second - for $299 a month, still a hefty price for small businesses and the average farming operation but Allen said UCNet’s aim is to open up the area for competition and drive prices down to the $30 to $40 per month range.
The terms of UCNet’s TAP grant state that it must match the $1.8-million it received form the province with fees and donations. It has set a $10,000 fee for vendors to supply it with services and has two levels of memberships as it gets its service under way. Large companies, known as a stakeholders, are paying $5,000 while a $1,000 fee has been set for smaller firms, known as consortium members. In-kind donations, such as a major contribution from AT&T, are also being credited against the grant.
But first, Allen said, UCNet wants the farm community to tell it if it’s on the right track. "Are we correct? Is this what you want? Do we have our priorities straight?"
UC Net may end up being most valuable to the rural community, Allen suggested, by being able to make bulk purchases of computers to make them more affordable in the hinterland, where PC ownership is considerably lower than in urban areas.
Members of the agriculture cluster have been invited along with other cluster groups to a conference at Kemptville College March 2. The meeting, entitled Cyber Bridge, will bring together representatives from Eastern Ontario and Northern New York for a series of workshops on how they can collaborate by using high speed Internet services.
The series of workshops grew out of a meeting in Watertown last fall and Allen said interest among Northern New York businesses and educational institutions who want high speed access to Ottawa’s high tech industries has been significantly greater than among Eastern Ontario municipalities.
For more information on the conference and the agriculture cluster , check UCNet’s Web site at www.uppercanada.net.
From the Archives:
News, February 2001
