We introduced you to Olds, Alberta and their community network O-Net in 2012. Now this community of 8,500 will be the first Canadian “gig town” where residents will have access to a gig at incredibly low prices.
CBC News reports that the Olds Institute for Community and Regional Development, the nonprofit organization building the network, recently approved the upgrade. Residents with 100 Mbps will have access to a gigabit with no increase in price. Depending on how they bundle, the price for Internet will range between $57-90 per month.
CBC’s Emily Chung noted how much of rural Canada offers only dial-up or satellite. Olds used to have the same problem; businesses were considering leaving town:
“We had engineering companies here who were sending memory chips by courier because there wasn’t enough bandwidth to deal with their stuff,” recalls Joe Gustafson, who spearheaded the project to bring a fibre network to Olds.
…
“Now there’s no talk about people leaving because of bandwidth challenges.”
The $13-14 million project, which also included a video conference center and 15 public use terminals for residents, launched in July 2012. The organization acquired a $2.5 million grant from the province of Alberta and a $6 million loan from the town of Olds. When incumbents were not interested in providing service over the network, O-Net adapted:
“We said, ‘Well I guess if we’re going to do this, we have to do our own services,'” Gustafson recalled.
The Olds Institute spent $3.5 million to buy the necessary electronic equipment to run internet and other services on the network and to build a central office to house it all. Last July, it launched O-Net.
The community-owned service offers not just internet, but also phone and IPTV services — TV signals carried on the network that includes dozens of SD and HD channels, and movies on demand that can be paused and later resumed.
The network will be available to the entire town by 2014. The residential plan brings one gig to access points in town that each serve four or five households. According to [Director of Marketing Nathan] Kusiek, that gig will be shared between households at each access point. There will be no data caps. Dedicated business gig access will be available for $5,000 per month.
The network has transformed teaching and learning. Local Olds College used to connect with 40 Mbps for 4,000 students.
That made it impossible to push any kind of mobile learning — something that the college was starting to get into with initiatives such as an entrepreneurship course that required students to play an online game as part of its requirements.
Now, every space on campus allows each student to connect two devices at the same time. This September, every new student will receive an iPad and all textbooks will be web-based.
Kusiek said, “Because we’re a community-owned project we get to balance out profitability versus what’s best for the community.”
Reading the comments on the CBC story is instructive of the different culture – the comments are overwhelmingly in support of Olds and castigate incumbent providers.