Canada’s telecommunications regulator says northerners will receive a subsidy aimed at making internet more affordable in the region.
This is one of several actions announced by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) on Thursday, following a years-long consultation on service in the North.
Those consultations involved input from various groups and individuals across the North. The regulator also conducted an online survey and held a week-long public hearing in Whitehorse in April 2023.
The amount of the planned subsidy and how it will be implemented have not yet been decided. The CRTC said it is launching another consultation process to determine those things.
The goal is to reduce the price difference between Internet services in the North and the rest of Canada. All northern households will be eligible to receive the monthly subsidy, regardless of their service provider, the regulator says.
The CRTC says its “preliminary view” is that small businesses in the North should be eligible for the subsidy, but it has not yet decided whether it should be available to schools, band offices, community centers and nonprofit organizations.
The deadline to submit comments on the proposed subsidy plan is February 18.
Credit for internet outages
The CRTC also announced Thursday that Northwestel customers will now see a reduction in their monthly bill whenever internet service is interrupted for 24 hours or more. The credit would be proportional to the duration of the interruption.
“These credits will help address the impact of grid outages on residents’ daily lives,” reads a CRTC news release.
As part of its consultations, the CRTC said it found that only one in five households in the North has “internet access that meets their daily needs,” and that almost all of those households had experienced a service interruption at some point in the year. previous year. .
Those disruptions to services can affect everything from online learning to healthcare and access to emergency services, the regulator says.
The CRTC also said Thursday that it would take steps to make it easier for competitors to use Northwestel’s network to sell services to customers. In the past, competing companies have complained about Northwestel’s wholesale rates for bandwidth on its network.
