Who is paying for all this?
In many cases, the public will be paying for the costs associated with building advanced communications, whether through the private or public sector, and these costs will show up on our tax bills, phone bills or cable bills some time in the near future.

There appears to be no immediate plan by the public or private sectors to ask Canadians whether there is something else we might rather do with the money invested on our behalf in the communications infrastructure. Unlike the concerted public outcry that met the Canadian cable companies' 1995 move to "negative option billing," there has been little public debate about these expenditures.

Institutional Costs
It is somewhat easier to pin down the costs of new learning technologies at the institutional level because educational providers tend to track their costs quite closely. This means there are some points for comparison in estimating additional costs for new learning technologies.

For example, educational institutions with established distance education programs usually have specific budgets for serving their students using a variety of technologies including print, audiotape, telephone, teleconferencing, videoconferencing and computer conferencing. A number of internal cost studies have demonstrated that costs for serving students using "older" distance technologies were equivalent to, and sometimes lower than, the costs for serving on-site students. The costs for distance education are also much lower than providing traveling instructors unless there are special funding arrangements in place and/or costs are shared between the host community and the educational provider.

The costs of the newer learning technologies tend to be considerably higher than the costs of technologies used to provide flexible and open learning. For example, the capital costs of basic equipment for audio conferencing, which allows learners and instructors in different locations to have a direct conversation, have been estimated at $5,100 per site, increasing to $10,200 per site for audiographics. But it costs $20,000 to $30,000 per site for interactive videoconferencing that uses phone lines.⁸

Operating costs
In general, technologies providing real time transmission, especially those that require multiple lines or broadband systems, have substantial ongoing costs whether for telephone, cable or satellite systems. These costs increase with the numbers of sites served whether there are two or thirty students at that site. Long distance charges are a significant part of technology-based communications relying on phone lines, especially those that require broadband to transmit video and computer graphics. Satellite transmission of video entails ongoing costs for the use of satellite time.⁹

Line charges are such a significant cost factor that a consortium of Canadian educational institutions presented a brief to the CRTC requesting a change in regulations so that phone companies could set reduced tariffs for educational purposes. In September 1996, the CRTC determined that telephone companies could provide reduced rates for educational purposes, but stipulated so many conditions it is doubtful whether any educational institution would be eligible. ¹⁰

By contrast, technologies that do not provide real time interaction may be lower cost in the long run. Computer conferencing, in which messages are sent on a delayed basis (called "asynchronous" transmission), can be significantly cheaper than audio or videoconferencing. At present, computer based communications systems are generally lower in actual transmission costs, providing the computer user does not have to pay long distance line charges to reach a server, and the local Internet Service Provider (ISP) charges reasonable rates.