Blog – Digital Divide
My interest in providing a Digital Divide Blog is to capture some key interesting events either locally, nationally or globally. These events would indicate a moving-forward event or that of being stuck.
Furthermore, these types events show a point in time what the situation was and likely what improvements could yet be made.
Starlink – Is it going to work for Northern Canada?
In recent articles we covered the story about how serving the high arctic will not be possible with a fibre optic line owing to the thousands of miles of buried cabled that would be necessary to connect these very remote and sparsely populated communities. However,...
Canadian High-Speed Broadband Access plan in response to the COVID-19 pandemic
The Federal government has been busy during this pandemic. It has not only been focusing on ameliorating the effects and consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, but it has also been looking past that into what we could or should be doing once this pandemic is over. One...
How the Digital Divide is challenging the Return to School process during the Covid Pandemic
When the COVID pandemic hit our shores last winter, school systems wound down their classes towards the end of March and attempted to teach online and via other means. Many challenges were uncovered, with the digital divide being a significant challenge to families...
Conversion from desktop, to laptop to mobile platforms.
We have witnessed a vast shift in users moving from desktops computers, to laptop computers and now to mobile phones. As a result, we have seen over the past 10 years a rapid increase in mobile phone usage and a comparative decline in desktop computers. If one of...
Ontario Steps up to close the Digital Divide
One of the abiding fears that some of us have is that after the COVID-19 pandemic is cleared all the digital divide gains that were made with tele-medicine, tele-justice, distance education and the like are going to get swept away; that the “nattering nabobs of...
Stability of Bandwidth and Community Resources – Digital Divide
In rural locations the fibre optic lines and wired Broadband systems can be fickle. It is not always possible to send tech service staff to re-establish wireless and broadband services in small rural locations. Tech service people may be quite some distance away and...
Cybera speaks up: Impact of COVID-19 on rural internet In Alberta
With Alberta cancelling classes for the remainder of the school year, on March 15; a set of instructions were provided to teachers and students alike. Copyright: Province of Alberta It was clear from these instructions that communication between these two was expected...
Granny gets on the Internet – finally!
Our mother did not want to get a mobile phone or a computer. She would always tell us, "I survived without these things to this time and I will be just fine without them!" With mom being over 90 years old now, this has been a running discussion with her for many...
The Doctor is in and is now using Telemedicine!
Telemedicine has been promised for over two decades. It has been practiced for some time in the remote regions of Canada, due to the lack of access to specialists. Many specialized equipment setups were developed for these purposes, which allows a physician to direct...
Escalating Bandwidth Requirements and Costs – Digital Divide
As our mobile technologies progress, we rely on it much more and use it for many more reasons than we originally understood at the time of purchase. The 2 Gb or even 10 Gb data cap that many users have is not really serving us very well. With a now regular load of...