GoFred: Municipally-Owned ICT Utilities in Fredericton, New Brunswick
- E-Novations, City of Fredericton, Canada. Email: mike.richard@fredericton.ca
- PhD Candidate, Department of Sociology, University of New Brunswick.
Fredericton, capital of the Canadian province of New Brunswick, is home to approximately 55,000 residents. Fredericton is relatively isolated, peripheral to the major cities in the country. The city airport is home to only one airline and there are no international flights. Fredericton's major economic activity is support for the provincial government. Because of this, the Fredericton municipal government has sought to brand itself around its knowledge economy, centered on its two universities (University of New Brunswick and Saint Thomas University), several cultural institutions, as well as significant IT and Engineering sectors.
In relation to this branding strategy, the City of Fredericton owns and runs its own not-for-profit telecommunications company as a utility. This company, a local internet service provider (ISP) called e-Novations (www.e-novations.ca) was founded in 2001 to provide a locally-owned alternative to the larger commercial telecoms that previously had no competition in the city (for more, see: Fred-eChronicles). In the last year e-Novations has rebranded its services as goFred (www.gofred.ca). The municipal company serves to demonstrate that Fredericton is not a sleepy little town in the middle of New Brunswick, and has helped attract ICT groups and scholars to the city. As noted by Powell (2008), Atlantic Canada has struggled to retain and expand its workforce, and Fredericton's branding project has been a response to this challenge.
Fredericton demonstrated its worth to the ICT sector by becoming the first "free wireless city" in Canada by incorporating a city-wide wireless service called the Fred e-zone in 2003 (City of Fredericton, online). This service is described as a 'best effort' service, and the network is usually functional. goFred does not guarantee that the service will be as reliable as private or personal networks, but it is a significant offering compared to larger centers which may charge for similar wi-fi service. Fredericton won a Canadian Information Productivity Award (CIPA) in 2004 with the development of this service. This helped draw attention to the city, and the project has led Fredericton to be featured around the world as an up and coming IT city. It has also drawn the attention of various group and scholars who are interested in the impact of a free wireless service (e.g. O'Donnell & Richard, 2006; Middleton, 2007; Middleton & Crow, 2008; Powell, 2008).
GoFred's mission is to offer lower cost connectivity to benefit local businesses and government while reinvesting the money paid by members of the service to continually enhance the services they provide. To do this, they have begun to offer commercial internet to Fredericton businesses at a 75% price advantage beginning in the fall of 2013. Furthermore, they want to provide services that incumbent carriers such as Bell and Rogers have refused to provide - private dark fibre networks suited to data transfer for businesses and local organisations (see: Markoff, 2010).
GoFred provides free wireless to citizens. Wireless hotspots are supported by the revenue generated by their paying customers, which use the extra network capacity available to broadcast the free wi-fi. In turn, hot spots are hosted by businesses that purchase their connection from goFred. goFred's private services operate on a philosophy of net neutrality. However, on the free Fred-ezone wireless service, goFred makes an effort to block access to certain websites (e.g. porn websites) as well as track suspicious high usage activity (e.g. spammers). While this serves the policy of moderating what kind of content is accessible to the public, pragmatically this is in an effort to save bandwidth.
GoFred services extend to a wide variety of public and private sector users. The service connects about 30 other buildings in within the City of Fredericton as well as 35 municipal buildings, both universities, the provincial electricity company New Brunswick Power, the provincial government, and the city's airport. Two non-profit agencies (The Playhouse performing arts centre and the local YMCA), as well as many private sector companies, including firms such as the commercial IT security service Q1Labs, also use GoFred. The service also extends to the federal government and connects the Federal Potato Research Center to CANARIE (Canada's Advanced Research Innovation Network).
The goFred business model is to provide low-cost, high quality LAN and internet connections (i.e. dark fibre) to the local community. They buy their bandwidth from Bell and Rogers, and employ contractors to work on connection projects. While the City of Fredericton employs approximately 650 staff, goFred technically has no employees and is run entirely as a municipal utility by staff. Service work is conducted by contracted companies around Fredericton.
When goFred, previously e-Novations, emerged in the late 1990s when the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) deregulated telecommunications, allowing for multiple non-dominant carriers to exist. GoFred is a registered CRTC provider, operating its network through fibre cabling carried on public utility poles and through underground conduits. Its service was originally intended to cover most of the city's business center and municipal facilities (Blackwell, 2004).
e-Novations applied for federal funding from the Smart Community initiative of the federal government department Industry Canada. The Smart Communities initiative began in the late 1990s in order to increase the number of people accessing and using information technology (for a commentary on the movement, see: Moser, 2001). The Smart Community program guide suggests that such communities will: "pursue a Smart agenda [that] should transform their social, economic and cultural processes rather than make cautious incremental improvements in the delivery of services and information to citizens" (Industry Canada, 1999). Although e-Novationswas not successful in its application to this initiative, the Fredericton city council directed the staff involved to keep going with the project. With the success of its predecessor's initial projects, goFred has continued to expand its services to keep up with the needs of its customers.
GoFred's focus is aiding the economic development of the city by providing telecommunication services, so that its client organizations can focus on the core aspects of their businesses. GoFred maintains a philosophy of offering organic service - whatever utility their customers ask for, they attempt to provide. Further, goFred makes the effort to show their customers exactly how the connectivity functions. Whereas bigger telecoms function on non-expertise of their customers, goFred attempts to demystify the connection process as much as possible. One service that has recently appeared is co-op internet, which came about when customers wanted to pool their resources together to purchase high quality, enterprise level internet.
GoFred also offers cloud data storage and back office systems to not-for-profit organizations so they can use their funds to aid their organisations rather than spend it on operating data management services. A stated purpose of the network is to provide a living lab for IT organizations in Fredericton. In keeping with this principle, one of its members, IT security specialists Q1 Labs (an IBM company), tracks and deals with security issues that threaten goFred and e-Novation customers. Q1Labs also uses the goFred network to test out their security software. By using the data gained by their trials on the goFred network, Q1 Labs hopes to sell these products to larger corporations outside of Fredericton. The goFred network services supply Q1 Labs with real time data for analysis to help with product development (see: http://q1labs.com/).
In a world where telecom providers are continuing to merge, converge, increase in girth and dwindle in number, services like goFred challenge the centralisation of ownership and a growing dependency on outside assistance. As successive governments push the information society policy agenda forward, telecommunication providers are necessary, but they challenge local autonomy (Bodnar, 2004; Philpot, Beaton & Whiteduck, 2014). The central issue is with the dominance enjoyed by the largest of those providers (e.g. Bell Canada, Rogers). Already well established, these carriers have the funds to capitalise on the need for connectivity over smaller, local providers, who are then purchased, pushed out of the business or bankrupted. Some local people in cities the size of Fredericton will of course be employed by the large telecom companies to deliver local services, but problems arise when the local population finds itself dependent on expertise outside the city (Philpot, Beaton & Whiteduck, 2014).
Given that goFred is owned and run by local community members who are employed by the municipal government, the service provides opportunities for the city to develop local enterprises and initiatives. Establishing local enterprise provides the means for fostering ICT skills within the local community, and allows jobs to remain in the local economy. With larger national providers such as Bell and Rogers, many of those opportunities are transient. While some revenues generated by the created jobs and the use of the services stay within the city, large service providers must inevitably focus on capturing new and larger markets, which means their attention is ultimately national rather than local. The profits that larger telecoms accumulate benefit corporate objectives, rather than those of the local community. While goFred and e-Novations do have to rely on Bell and Rogers for some of their services, they make a point of employing local contract workers, which has added benefits for the city itself.
For the future, goFred faces two main challenges. First, there are the local challenges of satisfying the City Council and its Board of Directors. This involves managing the expectations from both customers and the City Councillors. Secondly, there are challenges from the telecommunications industry and the CRTC regarding behaviours and actions around the internet and net neutrality. Ultimately, because it comes under the regulatory control of the CRTC, any CRTC decisions that affect the role of Internet Service Providers with respect to issues of net neutrality will have to be enforced by goFred. This threatens goFred's philosophy towards net neutrality, and they are determined to fight against it as much as they can.
Other challenges include making people aware of the service. Currently, goFred does not spend any money on mass advertising - everything is passed by word-of-mouth --whereas Bell and Rogers have significant advertising budgets. While we do not have any statistics about how many people are aware of goFred, anecdotally we can suggest that many are still unaware of the services it provides.
GoFred could be a useful model for other communities, but there is a catch. Offering dark fibre networks for local businesses requires an existing fibre network to use. Usually this means that dark fibre networks are only possible in larger population centers where fibre has been laid and remains available for purchase or lease. Often this also requires purchasing or leasing from another provider as well. The goFred strategy may be more attractive for high-population areas, because it would likely require significant funding from both federal and provincial governments in smaller communities, particularly ones that do not already function to serve the government and public sector industries.
Nevertheless, the example of goFred has shown some of the benefits of a city choosing to own and run its own internet utilities. While challenges are inevitable, moving towards local ownership and service means that skills and talent will continue to remain local and rooted in the needs of the local community.