Feds Drop $8.3 Million to Connect 822 Ontario Homes to High-Speed Internet

Ottawa is putting more than $8.3 million CAD into two projects that will bring high-speed internet to up to 822 households in five Indigenous and remote Ontario communities, including 621 Indigenous homes, Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada said on August 24.

The announcement was made on Christian Island at Beausoleil First Nation. The money comes from the Universal Broadband Fund, the $3.225 billion CAD federal program aimed at getting 98 percent of Canadian households to high-speed internet by the end of 2026 and 100 percent by 2030.

Homes that do not want to wait on a fibre crew already have an alternative. SpaceX’s Starlink can get a household online in days, and residential plans start at $75 CAD a month depending on the address, which can work out cheaper than sitting through a government-funded build.

Canada’s Connectivity Strategy still defines high-speed as at least 50 Mbps down and 10 Mbps up. The government says 97.4 percent of households already have that, up from 79 percent in 2014, and that it has spent more than $2.5 billion CAD on Ontario connectivity projects since 2015.

The release does not name the two project leads or the other four communities besides the Christian Island event site.

Parliamentary Secretary Pauline Rochefort made the announcement for Buckley Belanger, Secretary of State for Rural Development. Belanger called high-speed internet “foundational infrastructure for today’s rural economy, just like roads, bridges and power lines.”

The same fund has also set aside up to $50 million CAD for mobile projects that mainly serve Indigenous communities.

This is a small add-on next to earlier Ontario builds, including a $97 million federal-provincial project for more than 18,600 northern Ontario homes and a $1.8 million Cogeco expansion in eastern Ontario. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is running a separate effort to cut red tape on Indigenous broadband applications and speed up its own Broadband Fund, which is different from ISED’s Universal Broadband Fund.