National Capital FreeNet (NCF) turned 30 in 2022, which is a significant milestone — especially for a small, local not-for-profit that started out by providing dial-up access to digital resources and community information before the world wide web and commercial internet service providers even existed.
Over the years, NCF has evolved into a social enterprise carving out a small but important corner of the multi-billion-dollar telecommunications industry. As one of Canada’s few models of community tech ownership, we live our values by selling affordable internet, investing in our network to ensure high quality connectivity, continuing to offer free community services like locally-hosted email, digital skills resources and training, and the award-winning support of our HelpDesk of staff and volunteers.
It hasn’t always been easy and the last few years of the pandemic, inflation, global supply chain shortages and regulatory inaction by the CRTC have made our work that much harder. This has been made evident in part by the rash of recent acquisitions of independent Internet Service Providers by the major telecom companies: Bell bought EBOX and Distributel, Telus bought Start.ca and Altima, Cogeco bought Oxio, Videotron bought VMedia and Rogers bought Shaw.
As a community-owned not-for-profit, NCF cannot be bought, but our sustainability is not guaranteed. I’d like to think 2022 was a year of renewing our commitment to affordability and what we now call digital equity and has always been a commitment to bridging the digital divide, while recalibrating our work in line with current conditions while pushing for better.
I have been with NCF for more than eight years now, which feels nearly impossible, despite all that’s happened. In that time, I still haven’t gotten over how amazing it is that NCF started and continues to exist as a community resource. Thank you to all current and past NCF members, volunteers, Board members and staff who have kept NCF active and relevant for so long and the funders and community partners who have supported and continue to support our work.
Summary:
Services and Membership:
In 2022, NCF continued to offer high-speed internet services over the Bell and Rogers networks. The DSL internet services delivered over the Bell network offer speeds up to 50/10Mbps and the cable internet services delivered over the Rogers network offer speeds up to 1024/50Mbps. Currently, we have a direct wholesale relationship with Bell for our DSL services and TekSavvy is the wholesale supplier of our cable internet services over the Rogers network.
Unfortunately, we pay basically the same high wholesale rates for these services we have been paying since 2016. The CRTC had substantially dropped these rates in 2019, but after Bell, Rogers and the other major telecom companies pushed back, the CRTC reversed its earlier decision. At the same time, we still do not have access to Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP, also known as Fibre-to-the-Home or FTTH) services, despite the CRTC first ruling about wholesale access in 2015.
That said, we last changed our prices in February 2021 and were proud in 2022 to hold prices steady for another year despite inflation and hitting our highest per member usage ever.
DSL usage: Jan. 2011-Dec. 2022
As the pandemic sped up the demand for faster line speeds, we hoped adding higher-speed cable internet services in 2021 would help retain DSL members who needed to upgrade. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been enough and after slow and steady net DSL member growth from 2005 to 2019, we continued to lose DSL members in 2022 and the growth in cable members hasn’t been enough to offset these losses.
DSL members: Jan. 2011 – Dec. 2022
The national Rogers network outage in July 2022 drove home the need for resilient networks. NCF has made network redundancy and resilience a particular priority since we upgraded our routers in 2017, with many other improvements since. In 2022 this included adding more new equipment and changing our network configuration to allow for better fail-over between systems, drafting a Business Continuity Plan, working with an external contractor on network support, identifying new suppliers to ensure fibre and path diversity in our data centre, and formalizing our network maintenance.
The HelpDesk handled more than 6000 tickets last year, and we thank them for their work! This includes staff members Eric Adu Boahene, Budry Ahmed, Lily An, Luke Deschenes, Chelsey Gero, Tom Lumsden, Fabian Maldonado, Naftali Shani and Andrés Carranco, who was the Operations and HelpDesk Manager until the end of October/22.
A special thanks to Naftali Shani, who worked at NCF for 10 years in a variety of roles — including acting as interim Executive Director for a time and building our ingenious e-waste bin! Naftali transitioned from being staff to a volunteer HelpDesk Analyst at the end of 2022.
Thanks too to the volunteers who support the HelpDesk, including Nader Hussain, Kai Keskinen, Michael Wong, and new volunteers Michel Salvas and Toby Mielke. Volunteering has been remote since 2020 and we look forward to growing back the capacity of our volunteer training program in a new hybrid capacity over the next few years.
Digital equity and Advocacy:
As noted above, the five years under CRTC Chair Ian Scott were not easy for NCF: there was no movement on direct Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) access, although Bell has been rolling it out locally for more than seven years. Then, after two years of deliberations, the Commission reversed its 2019 wholesale rate drop.
Together this has made it hard for NCF to offer the speeds and services that members want and keep our prices as low as we would like. This included us having to pause our plans to expand the eligibility of our Community Access Fund program beyond Ottawa Community Housing tenants to others living on low incomes, and to offer higher speeds at lower prices.
The one bright light in 2022 came with the government’s proposed Renewed Approach to Telecommunications Policy for the CRTC. This was in response to petitions to the Governor in Council filed in 2021 after the CRTC rate reversal, including by NCF.
In July 2022 we were happy to offer our comments in support of the proposed new policy direction. NCF supported the new policy’s emphasis on internet affordability and underscored the benefits of all kinds of competition, including community-owned internet providers like NCF as a not-for-profit, as well as co-operatives and providers owned by Indigenous communities and municipalities, while also recognizing the importance of social investment and innovation, alongside financial investments and technological innovation.
We were happy to see the government finalize this new policy in February 2023 and look forward to the changes it may drive at the CRTC and ultimately for NCF and our members, as well as all Canadians.
The biggest work we did in relation to digital equity in 2023 was NCF’s 30th anniversary time capsule. Originally envisioned as a way for NCF members to contribute their perspectives on the future of the internet, technology and digital equity, when member interest in submitting prediction videos was low, we sought out 30 digital equity champions and advocates from across the country to share their perspectives.
Perspectives ranged from Madeleine Redfern, the former mayor of Iqaluit who is currently working to bring undersea fibre connectivity to Nunavut, to Eyra Abraham, the founder and CEO of tech start-up Lisnen, offering services to the deaf and hard-of-hearing, as well as Ray Noyes, an Ottawa ACORN member who has felt first-hand the effects of the digital divide, especially during the pandemic, and science fiction novelist and digital rights advocate Cory Doctorow. If you haven’t already, please check them all out here: www.ncf.ca/timecapsule
Thanks to our Canada Summer Jobs student Samaia Aidroos and Business and Community Development Manager Andrew Martey Asare for making it happen, and to local social enterprise Hot Shoe Enterprises for their video editing and captioning skills.
During the pandemic, as the demand for NCF’s internet services increased along with the need for more hands-on support for members transitioning to working from home, going to school from home and accessing health and government services, so too did the need for digital skills. Unfortunately, we had lost many volunteers and our staff were stretched in trying to meet the existing demand for internet service. As a result, we did not transition our digital skills workshops to an online format, despite our best intentions.
We are working on bringing back workshops in 2023 and beyond, ideally in a hybrid in-person and online format to enable as many members as possible to benefit. We also plan to help spread the word about the great digital skills workshops and services being offered by other community groups in our region.
The other main digital equity work we’ve been quietly continuing with is trying to start a pilot for a free Community WiFi Network. We have been continuing to seek funding and refine the technological details but the basics remain the same in our 2020 report on community mesh networks.
We want to expand our existing partnership with Ottawa Community Housing (OCH) to put an antenna on one of their apartment tower rooftops. We have looked at 800 St. Laurent Boulevard and 380 Murray Street as potential pilot locations, which would then be able to effectively beam or broadcast free community WiFi within a 5km range that would include in and around the building, to neighbouring community organizations, and ideally to parks and schools. We think this could be a gamechanger for NCF and the communities we serve, not as a substitute for affordable home connectivity but as a supplement to ensure universal connectivity in neighbourhoods that have too often been overlooked.
To date, we have standing agreements with OCH and other potential partners and have been looking for grant-based funding. Given that we haven’t been successful in getting a grant yet, we are also looking into other funding options.
In the last few years we have connected with many other community-owned tech organizations and digital equity advocates, including Toronto Free-Net, Chebucto Community Net in Halifax, Toronto Mesh, Telecommunities Canada, the Institute for Local Self Reliance in the US, the City of Calgary Digital Equity team, Internet Society Manitoba and their North End Connect community network project, and all those we engaged with as we established Digital Equity Ottawa.
We have appreciated this work and look forward to more of it. In 2022 we started by re-energizing our work with the Social Planning Council of Ottawa on Digital Equity Ottawa and, on a national level, by laying the groundwork for a future conference on community networking. Though lots has changed, the rise of community networks and other community-owned tech infrastructure echoes the rise of the Free-Net movement, captured in the first International Free-Net Conference NCF hosted at Carleton in August 1993.