Re "EORN Grant - "a little insulting" Says Vandewal"

Matt Marsh | Jul 31, 2024

As an engineer with considerable experience in networking, I was quite surprised to see EORN described as "successful since its inception".

EORN's trunk fibre network was undeniably a success, but its last-mile projects were a disaster. Rather than building and owning the necessary public infrastructure itself, EORN gave the money for last-mile buildout to incumbent private-sector telecom firms, binding them to minimal conditions and granting them near-monopoly power over entire counties.

Xplornet, which won the monopoly on South Frontenac, sat on their pile of taxpayer money for years before grudgingly doing a slow and incomplete fixed-wireless buildout; Bell and WTC, which lost the bid, spent ten years refusing all customer requests to extend their very limited networks. To this day, Xplornet's performance is an order of magnitude worse, and their reliability is three orders of magnitude worse, than comparably-priced providers in Kingston or in European rural townships similar to ours. EORN made no attempt at all for eight years to enforce any standards of service, performance, or reliability, and carefully kept the actual contracts secret.

I tried several times between 2014–2019 to encourage EORN to assist in setting up rural internet co-ops, as have proven so successful in other villages worldwide, to build and own the last-mile network from EORN's trunk lines to residential and business endpoints. EORN was non-responsive and unhelpful. It is only in the last two years that Starlink has brought real competition to the ISP market in Frontenac and forced Bell and Xplornet to invest their own capital into upgrading their own networks.

If EORN's management remains blind to the organization's previous failures and has learned no lessons from them, then I am not sure how or why the organization could be trusted with new projects in a very different field.

Matt Marsh