With the onslaught of telephone calls in recent weeks to Fort Frances and area residents asking them to sign up for Bell Sympatico High Speed Internet, the question of when broadband access will arrive here once again has arisen.
The phone calls from Bell Canada Call Centre telemarketers came on the heels of local groups selecting Bell as the service provider for a business plan they’ve submitted to the federal government for broadband funding through Industry Canada’s BRAND program.
However, the calls were unwarranted. Bell isn’t ready to provide DSL service here, nor are they willing to say when that may be.
“It strictly was an error on the Bell Sympatico folks’ part,” said Caren Naismith, the regional manager for Bell’s Northwestern Ontario Customer Service and Community Affairs department. “It was an ‘oops,’ and it shouldn’t have happened.”
She explained that Fort Frances was added to the database as a community DSL was coming to in the near future by accident. She called the mistake “human error” and said it has happened before to other communities.
“I was quite upset,” she said. “It wasted the customers’ time.”
She explained that on some occasions, customers will get literature and electronic correspondence that is aimed at a wide variety of clientele, and that some of those services aren’t always available in all areas.
“In this particular case, those customers in Fort Frances were specifically advised it was available, and it was not,” she said apologetically.
“You never like to tell someone something is there and then not be able to deliver on it,” said Ron Alberelli, a salesman with Bell Sympatico in Ottawa, and account manager for the Fort Frances Times.
“From what I know, it is coming,” noted Alberelli, referring to high-speed service. “Now it looks like early 2004.
“All I knew is it was coming in the next couple of weeks,” he said of what the database system indicated. “[Then] apparently there was some kind of road block with the aboriginal nations in the area . . . I’m still waiting for clarification. I’m kinda in the dark on that.
“I know that plans have changed and things have been delayed,” he concluded. “Unfortunately, that’s where we’re sitting. I know there are a lot of people waiting for this.”
But Naismith said otherwise. “I can tell you, it was not blocked because of any aboriginal issues,” she remarked. “It was [just] an error.”
In any event, the error has been rectified. Fort Frances has been removed from the database—to the point that it comes up with nothing, where as before there was some indication that it would be coming soon.
But that doesn’t bring the town any closer to getting DSL service.
“I can tell you the reason Fort Frances is on the radar is because I’ve been working with Bell Sympatico regarding several communities in Northwestern Ontario,” Naismith said. “Fort Frances happens ot be one of our highest populated communities in Northwestern Ontario.”
Naismith explained that she has been working with communities and businesses in the area about partnerships “to be able to deliver DSL, regardless of BRAND funding.”
On the BRAND front, she said that Bell “as a company, is awaiting notification from stakeholders if we’ve been awarded the tender.”
She continued by adding that the stakeholders—specifically Pwi-Di-Goo-Zing Ne-Yaa-Zhing Advisory Services and Rainy River Future Development Corporation—who submitted a “joint” business plan to the federal government, can’t award a tender until their proposal has been approved by the government.
That response to the Advisory Services RFP was literally Bell’s standard DSL platform.
“We’d be deploying our standard DSL technology,” described Naismith, “utilizing existing switches and upgrading certain software and electronics.”
She explained that a $2 million upgrade to the switch in Fort Frances close to three years ago–by installing a “remote DMS 100”–will allow Bell to make some simple software and electronics upgrades to bring broadband to Fort Frances.
“The majority of switches [across the district] have the capacity to be upgraded with software and electronics,” she said of the service in various communities. “Where it becomes a challenge is taking it out of the community.”
In other words, it is the more rural areas that can be a problem.
A switch like the one in Fort Frances has distance barriers that don’t permit it to provide high-speed Internet to rural—and even suburban—communities.
She described that if you looked down on Fort Frances from the air, with the Bell office at the centre, and drew a circle with a radius of 4.5 km, that would be the reach of the local switch.
Anyone in that radius would have the ability to access high-speed Internet through Bell, she explained, providing there aren’t any other factors to limit your access.
However, according to information on Bell Canada’s own Web site, the limitation of the switch is approximately a 4.5 km loop, not as the crow flies.
This means the distance the line travels from the switch to the home and back to the switch including every little twist and turn it might make getting there and back.
“Telephone lines don’t follow a straight line to a house,” reads the answer to the question “Why can’t I get it?” on Bell’s own Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) link.
“It may not look far,” it continues, “but lines follow paths that may add quite some length to the wire. It is the actual measurement of the wire that determines if a customer is within or outside the distance of availability. The range of Bell Sympatico High-Speed service is within a loop length of 4.5 km from the central office.”
This limits the radius of the hypothetical circle to a maximum of 2.25 km, but realistically it is probably much less than that.
Naismith insisted that “I’ve always stated, it is approximately 4.5 km from our serving switch,” when confronted with this discrepancy.
But the length of the loop isn’t the only determining factor as to whether you’ll be able to get DSL service.
According to a white paper on solutions to extend DSL reach by Lucent Technologies, loop qualification, both in length and in quality are critical to subscribers served directly on copper facilities from a central office.
“DSL throughput is inversely proportional to loop length,” the paper reads. “All DSL ‘flavours’ are sensitive to the line length between the CO [central office] and the subscriber’s premises, and more than a third of all existing loops are greater than 12,000 feet.
“Distance limitations occur with ADSL modems as they are generally ineffective over these longer local loops,” it continues, “with transmission rates decreasing once the 12,000-foot mark [round trip] is exceeded.”
This means a 3.7 km local loop begins to push the speed of DSL service, and that’s before any imperfections in the line itself cause extended deterioration.
“In the local loop, the distance limitation has to do with the ‘noise environment’ and other line impairments,” explained former RRFDC consultant Jerry Korman.
“Most telephone wiring, especially the stuff more than 10 years old, has little, if any, shielding,” he continued. “It can also be assumed the shielding and insulation already there has started to decay. Usually, old copper plant will fail qualification tests, which is primarily a 23-tone test probe.”
According to Naismith, if you have poor copper running to your home, Bell will replace it.
“First, we investigate the reasons why [there is a problem]” she explained. “If it’s a problem we can fix, we fix it. If something is wrong with the copper, we’d fix the copper. We always do preventative maintenance.
“When we deploy high-speed Internet, we guarantee that speed,” she said, adding that the speed depends on the type of service package the subscriber purchases.
This means someone purchasing the regular Sympatico High-Speed service would be “guaranteed” up to 960 kilobits per second (kbps) download rate and a 120 kbps upload rate. That’s roughly 30 times faster than a 28 kbps dial-up modem connection.
However, depending on distance from the switch and line imperfections, as well as round trip delay of the signal (DSL can fail if the round trip delay exceeds 13 milliseconds) and Bit Error Rating (remote access allows for a BER of 1X10-10 or one bad bit per 10 billion,) the transfer rate can decay well below the “up to” rate of 960 kbps.
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