This week, at the Canadian Advanced Technology Alliance (CATAAlliance) gala and awards evening, I announced the formation of the i-Canada Alliance. The i-Canada initiative is a response to the impact of Canada being way behind the rest of the world in terms of our digital economy and broadband infrastructure. Canada’s speed is 1/100 to 1/1000 slower than 20 major competitors. I will chair this initiative, and I’m looking for your support.
I spoke recently about the sorry state of Canada’s digital infrastructure on TVOntario’s The Agenda. The video follows, including the episode description from TVOntario:
Our Digital Future: The Need for High-Speed
Slow down please, this is Canada! Canada’s digital networks are some of the slowest in the world, running between one hundred to a thousand times slower than other countries in the developed world. In this episode of “Our Digital Future – The Need for High-Speed”, Bill Hutchison, Executive Director of Intelligent Communities for Waterfront Toronto describes the sorry state of our digital infrastructure, stressing the need for major investments in advanced broadband networks. Bill Hutchison is a renowned business and social entrepreneur. He has been a founder of four successful business start-ups and CEO of three corporate turnarounds. As a social entrepreneur he has been the founding chair or director of ten industry and social consortia and charitable foundations.
Interested in responding to the challenge through the i-Canada Alliance? Your endorsement and pledge will help start building the necessary ideas, options and commitments. Please sign the i-Canada Declaration today: A New National Dream: global leadership through ultrafast communications.
I was “downsized” from Nortel in 1993. Hence it must have been late 80’s-early 90’s that Nortel was talking internally about a trial of fibre to the home in a subdivision in Florida. Here we are still talking about making that happen in Canada.