OTTAWA — Days after the late July announcement that the federal and Ontario governments would co-fund $1.2 billion worth of projects to extend broadband internet access to hard-to-serve places, Alberta revealed a $150-million plan of its own.

Getting the feds involved is explicitly one of the goals.

“We believe we’ll be able to secure additional federal funds for rural and remote and Indigenous broadband connectivity,” Premier Jason Kenney said in making the announcement. Service Alberta Minister Nate Glubish is “in ongoing discussions with the government of Canada.”

Making a deal will likely have to wait until after the September election, but before the campaign began the federal government had been consolidating federal and provincial programs with similar goals.

Besides the agreement with Ontario, it struck an $826.3-million accord with Quebec in the spring for a program that even has its own name: Operation High Speed. Both the Ontario and Quebec deals are 50-50 splits between the federal and provincial governments. Together, they account for more than a third of the plans for the budget of the federal government’s $2.75-billion Universal Broadband Fund.

So far, the fund has supported not quite $6.5 million in broadband projects in Alberta.

Working together saves everyone time and trouble, says a federal briefing note The Logic obtained through an access-to-information request: “The most efficient path forward would be for ON and Canada to work collaboratively to review and co-fund existing UBF applications in Ontario,” reads the April note, prepared for a meeting involving Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada and Ontario’s deputy minister of infrastructure.

Many of these projects are small and done by small companies—they hook up sparsely populated or remote places where big internet providers haven’t been interested in working, thanks to government subsidies in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Keeping the cost of administering them down, for governments and providers alike, is important.

Arnold Stoll’s Avetria Networks, for instance, is expecting over $640,000 to extend service to more than 85 households in Bloomingdale, a village in southwestern Ontario barely 10 kilometres from the University of Waterloo.

(The funding was announced in June, before Ontario and the federal government said they’d combine forces—no specific projects have been funded under the new arrangement yet.)

“We’re five minutes from town and some houses can’t get more than four- or five-megabit internet,” Stoll told The Logic. For comparison, Bell says a mid-range Fibe package delivers speeds of up to 150 megabits, and its top-end service offers 10 times that.

Stoll said he got into internet-service provision after an exasperating experience trying to get broadband to a rural property he had moved to.

The Bloomingdale project, into which Avetria is putting nearly $220,000 of its own, is costing $10,000 a household, but Stoll said it’s still a bit of a deal. It takes advantage of a fibre line laid years ago, to a now-defunct school in the community, that just needed to be reactivated.

The application involved submitting financials, mapping the expected service area and multiple follow-up exchanges, he said.

He’s never applied for funding from the Ontario government, he said, despite the hundreds of millions the province has made available for rural broadband over the years.

Not that the feds are any picnic: six weeks after the June announcement of the money for Bloomingdale, the day before the first house was to get service, Stoll said Avetria hadn’t received any paperwork to finalize anything.

“We’re already 75 per cent done this project and I don’t even have a contract yet,” he said. “I’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars. Which is … OK. But I don’t even know where we’re at, so it’s a little crazy.”

He figures that with a government news release to hold up, the money is coming—but Avetria bought gear for another project after getting oral encouragement to go ahead and it fell through.

“I can’t imagine [they would], but at any time, they can just say, ‘Screw you, Arnold and Avetria, you’re not getting funded.’ Right? They potentially could say that. So I just don’t know. The uncertainty is tough to manage.”

(The federal Innovation Department, which runs the Universal Broadband Fund, said through a spokesperson that a “due-diligence phase is necessary to ensure the conditions are in place for the success of the projects and the appropriate use of public funds” and this work is well underway for all the approved projects. Citing commercial confidentiality, the department wouldn’t talk about Avetria’s project in particular.)

Avetria might have six or seven people laying cable at busy times, Stoll said; the company phone number is his cellphone. He was taking a day away from installing cable to do paperwork, arranging “locates” so his crew can avoid infrastructure that’s already in the ground where they’re working.

“I’m just a private company, and I’m a local guy,” Stoll said.

Working with provinces’ own broadband programs is a goal for the Universal Broadband Fund now.

“The UBF can be a vehicle to complement existing provincial and territorial broadband initiatives, so that connectivity goals can be achieved more quickly, or to assist in connecting the remaining and hardest-to-reach homes,” said Yara El Helou, a spokesperson for the Innovation Department, by email.

She pointed out the fund has been used to cooperate with the government of British Columbia to subsidize new cell towers along the highway between Prince George and Prince Rupert, Numerous women, particularly Indigenous women, have disappeared or been found dead along the route over decades, and poor phone and wireless internet coverage makes it hard for women at risk to check in or call for help.

Besides the large-scale deals with Ontario and Quebec, El Helou said, “federal officials will continue the work with officials from provinces and territories, including Alberta, to explore opportunities to move forward and achieve our respective goals.”