Toronto’s Intelligent Waterfront Bets on Open Access Ultra High-Speed Broadband

Ivana sits overlooking Toronto Harbour from a newly built residential condo in East Bayfront, a section of the Toronto Waterfront that has developed into a mixed residential-digital media content developer community. Her condominium was recently occupied by athletes from the 2015 Pan American games that took place in the Toronto Region from July 10-26, 2015. Most of the athletes excelled not only in international sport but also were digitally active and appreciated the high-speed broadband that allowed them to connect with home in distant countries instantly and affordably. The games were also able to be broadcast, simulcast, podcast and distributed through many other mediums with the advanced broadband capabilities offered along Toronto’s Intelligent Waterfront. Restaurants promoted their specialties directly to their smartphones and the late evening entertainment linked in musicians from several continents to jam together on a late Saturday evening.

But as Ivana looked over the serene waters of Toronto Harbour, her multi-screen high-definition digital media project throbbed on-line in front of her. Her most recent designs were being tested by her colleagues in Sydney and Sao Paulo. But her consortium doesn’t stop there. Her design team includes a front-end coding team back in Prague, analysts in Bangalore, back-end programmers in Moscow and other contributing designers from every continent on the globe. Nearly all of these partners are people Ivana has never met in person, but she counts as people she is in constant contact with daily, often together over the cloud and requiring large amounts of data and video to be transferred among them. Their collaboration costs a fraction of being housed in a brick and beam structure in a city like Toronto. As a result, their previous collaborations have generated them profits as well as awards.

Ivana uploaded the design project in mere seconds and now they were just about to start on collaborative testing of the design project. Ivana is an international award winning digital media designer. Her design awards hang behind her on the wall of her dining room-cum studio. Ivana is a new Eastern European immigrant that had settled in Toronto’s new Intelligent Waterfront in order to enjoy the multi-cultural city, but also because she can work in an environment that provides among the most affordable broadband with the highest and most robust broadband speeds, downloading and uploading at 1 gigabyte per second. With the success of this project, Ivana hopes to be able to move into a full-sized studio with staff at the lower level of the building, keeping her condo with its spectacular views but also benefiting from the synergies of the studio with access to 10 Gigabytes per second broadband speeds.

This may be a vision of a world that Ivana will live in a few years from now after the 2015 Pan-Am Games have completed, but this is a very real scenario that is being developed in the East Bayfront today and will be thriving in a couple of years hence. A world of Ultra-high-speed broadband is not a distant dream but is a reality being developed in Toronto’s Intelligent Waterfront today.

On June 7, 2011, an announcement took place in the city’s newest multi-media and animation hub that will propel Toronto in the same leagues as Suwon, Korea and Chattanooga, Tennessee. These are rarified moments when a city can proclaim to differentiate itself from others in a crowded and competitive world. As of that day, Waterfront Toronto in partnership with Beanfield Metroconnect will create Canada’s first open-access ultra-high speed broadband community network throughout the new waterfront communities, transforming how residents and businesses in these areas will receive telecommunications services, be able to promote economic growth and development, and enable innovation.

“Broadband has become essential public infrastructure for 21st century communities, and the need for faster connections delivered over more robust networks has been intensifying since the dawn of the Internet age,” said John Campbell, President and CEO of Waterfront Toronto. “This state-of-the-art network will help us establish a new hub of innovation and stimulate enduring economic growth to help Toronto remain competitive with other world-leading cities, such as Seoul, Stockholm, and Tokyo where similar broadband infrastructures exist or are now being built.”

According to the developers, every home and business in the new communities along the Toronto Waterfront will be wired with fibre and full community-wide Wi-Fi services, providing affordable and unlimited access to internet speeds up to 500 times faster than typical North American residential networks, delivering internet connections starting at 100 megabits per second for unlimited access for residential customers at $60 included as part of their normal condominium fees and up to 10 gigabits per second for commercial customers.  Residential customers will also have access to 1 gigabyte speeds upon request.

The model is certainly unusual. According to Campbell, the open access network is being built without taxpayer dollars, through an arrangement with private sector development partners who are to initially provide the upfront capital in building the network. Waterfront residents and businesses are to have the highest performance internet services in Canada and guaranteed to be on par with that of the seven top global intelligent communities for 10 years beyond when the last building is built.

According to Don Tapscott, author of Paradigm Shift, Waterfront Toronto's advanced ultra-high speed community communications infrastructure and services shows that the new age of Wikinomics is set to blossom in the world’s leading Intelligent communities. He cites a future making possible mass collaboration, true telework, collaborative lifelong learning and hundreds of new services that only become practical when high speed ultra-broadband is available at affordable prices.
The network in Toronto’s Waterfront will be “open-access” where residents and businesses will be able to choose from a wide variety of content and service providers for internet, high-definition and internet protocol television, telephone, safety and security systems and more.

“This open, robust community-wide infrastructure will make the waterfront a living laboratory that encourages and supports innovation,” said Campbell. “The network we are building will enable the development of smart buildings, smart healthcare and smart education. Plus it can support new applications that promote better public safety and traffic management.”

Crediting the idea from attending the 2004 inaugural Intelligent Community Forum Summit in New York City, Campbell recalls the Eureka moment when, in my opening speech, I said that the secret to digital success in an Intelligent Community is only 5% connectivity and 95% content.

During that June 7 gathering, I also said, “Toronto Waterfront's plans meet the criteria and principles of being an Intelligent Community. From an infrastructure perspective, its fibre-optic network will provide open access for everyone in the community – both residents and businesses – with virtually unlimited access to the infrastructure and to a unique community portal. This will enable creative enterprises, knowledge work and research to thrive in this environment providing opportunities for higher productivity and prosperity for all. Open Access Networks have proven successful in Asia, USA and Europe; the best known and most mature being Vasteras, Sweden with dozens of providers and hundreds of services available to 40,000 homes and businesses."

Evan Kelly of PricewaterhouseCoopers concurs: “The speed and quality of broadband service is becoming a foundational element required of all world class cities to maintain competitiveness in a rapidly changing world. It is a critical element in attracting top talent and companies, driving innovation and creating real economic benefits.  In addition high speed broadband can deliver social benefits in areas such as healthcare and education. The communication demands of consumers continue to explode, driven by new applications and services such as social media, on demand music and video, electronic and mobile commerce.  In addition, residents are expecting advanced communications to form part of education and healthcare systems from a quality of life perspective.  Similarly, business demands for communications are increasing just as dramatically in an effort to keep ahead of the consumer and the competition.  Credible studies suggest that data traffic being carried over broadband will grow tenfold in the next 5 years.  In order to compete in a global economy businesses need access to information and the ability to act upon it in real time. Businesses also need to operate at lowest cost which requires continually looking for productivity enhancements many of which are communication technology driven with cloud computing being one such example.  Accordingly, access to exceptional connectivity infrastructure along with advanced services and applications is crucial for both consumers and businesses but for different reasons. In order to remain an environment of choice for business and residents, cities need to be high-speed broadband enabled. Without the ability to connect and operate on the latest and fastest platforms, be that from home or at work, the cities will become less attractive and potentially irrelevant.  The attraction and retention of the brightest talent and the most promising businesses requires a quality high-speed broadband service as a foundational element.”

Cisco’s Joe Deklic agrees: “The broadband platform will enable people to manage energy usage in their homes, work in a combination of physical and virtual offices, interact with students and teachers around the world, obtain health care regardless of location, make greener choices about how they travel, enjoy a more personalized, more productive shopping experience and go to stadiums that bring them closer to their favorite teams. And managers will be able to make more efficient use of utilities, maximize transportation system throughput, ensure public safety and personal security, manage smart buildings, optimize communications and coordinate emergency responses across agencies, cities and countries.”

As we begin to embrace high-speed connectivity, it becomes increasingly important for Intelligent Communities to focus on developing and nurturing a strong culture of use. Content that people want, or need, will be critical to the success of these communities, however early adopters will benefit from those that lag behind.

ICF’s theme this year is: Intelligent Communities – Platforms of Innovation. Although innovation is one of ICF’s five key criteria, we will focus on how Intelligent Communities create uniquely powerful innovation ecosystems on a foundation of information and communications technology, bringing together business, government and institutions in a dynamic partnership. The form that partnership will take and their results may vary from community to community, but their goals will be similar. They will want to produce results ranging from better and cheaper service delivery to citizens to the birth and growth of entrepreneurial businesses and vital new institutions. This year ICF will explore how Intelligent Communities are pioneers in this complex collaboration that powers innovation today and identify and examine who the best communities are at building an innovation culture attracting talent, investment and global recognition. For a greater appreciation of the theme, please refer to the ICF Whitepaper: Intelligent Communities – Platforms of Innovation.

By becoming a unique platform for innovation, Toronto’s Waterfront has as its core goal to create a better life for all its citizens and contribute towards building a vibrant future for Toronto’s next generation. Toronto is already one of the 100 global Intelligent Communities recognized by ICF and through this recent announcement will also be one of the key Intelligent Communities to watch over the next several years.