Northern Ontario Residential Broadband Program
Under the Next Generation Network Program (NGNP), CENGN, Canada’s Centre of Excellence in Next Generation Networks, is looking to fund innovative projects across northern Ontario that demonstrate technology solutions that offer flexible, lower cost, higher performance residential broadband access for northern Ontario communities. This program is designed to prove new technology approaches that can significantly improve business cases or new business models, be used to promote new field-proven innovations from technology applicants, offer an improved level of broadband access to unserved communities, develop new residential broadband ecosystems, and to share technical solutions with other northern Ontario communities looking for access or improvements to residential broadband solutions in their community.
CENGN will be providing funding for individual projects from its Northern Ontario Residential Broadband Program as part of the NGNP. CENGN is seeking technologies that address the requirement for specific technical problem statements that make it challenging to get broadband access to residences within northern Ontario communities. With the increasing demand for on-line municipal services, email communications, on-line cultural development, social media, distance learning, tele-medicine, remote medical monitoring, on-line homework/assignment submission for students, support for on-line business, and increasing need for on-line options to work from home, there is urgent need for high-performance, low-latency residential broadband access in northern Ontario communities.
In order to provide an environment to demonstrate the effectiveness of new residential broadband technology solutions, CENGN will be encouraging community Expression of Interest (EOI) responses from northern Ontario communities who are interested in hosting a technology project in their community. From the Community EOI responses, at least one community will be selected for this project. The project will be designed to prove that a technology solution can be installed and tested while demonstrating a significantly improved level of residential broadband service to the community. This project will also seek to demonstrate a marked improvement in the business case for residential broadband access improvements for the community.
CENGN will also be encouraging EOI responses from technology company applicants who are interested in providing equipment, technology, and support services to be used in the live 3 – 6 month monitored technology project. From the Technology EOI responses, a number of candidate technology companies will be selected for each Northern Ontario Residential Broadband Project to propose a technology solution that can be installed and tested to provide a significantly improved level of residential broadband service for the selected host community.
The purpose of the project will not only be to demonstrate a significant performance level improvement in residential broadband access in residences, but also to provide a well-tested, monitored, and documented implementation, that can be promoted and shared with other communities by the technology applicant(s), the community, and CENGN. It is key that the proposed project infrastructure will be scalable, and that the technology applicant is willing to work with the host community, and any necessary local partners, to come up with a plan to extend or expand the project infrastructure to completely meet the wider residential broadband needs of the community following the project’s successful completion.
Universities may participate in this program as a partner.