Canada’s telecommunications regulator says northerners will get a subsidy aimed at making internet more affordable in the region.
That’s one of several actions announced by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) on Thursday, following a years-long consultation about service in North.
Those consultations involved input from various groups and individuals from 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 beginning another consultation process to determine those things.
The goal is to reduce the price gap between internet services in the North and elsewhere in Canada. All northern households will be eligible for 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’s not yet decided whether it should be available to schools, band offices, community centres and non-profits.
The deadline to submit comments on the proposed subsidy plan is Feb. 18.
Credit for internet outages
The CRTC also announced on Thursday that Northwestel customers will now see a reduction on their monthly bill whenever internet service is disrupted for 24 hours or longer. The credit would be proportional to how long the outage was.
“These credits will help address the impact of network 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 have “internet access that meets their daily needs,” and that almost all of those households had seen a service outage at some point in the previous year.
Those service disruptions can affect everything from online learning to health care and access to emergency services, the regulator says.
The CRTC also said on Thursday that it would take steps to make it easier for competitors to use Northwestel’s network to sell services to customers. Competing companies in the past have complained about Northwestel’s wholesale rates for bandwidth on its network.
