Investments in telephone systems

Stentor, the alliance of Canada's telephone companies, has announced plans to invest $8- $10 billion in its Beacon Initiative to upgrade local telephone networks so that 80% of telephone subscribers will be able to have access to broadband lines by 2005.³⁰ Broadband telephone access would support the use of new learning technologies from a given community.

However, priorities for investment in enhanced systems will be based on potential rate of return, CRTC policy now stipulates that rates for specific services to specific regions be set at cost recovery levels, rather than averaging costs over a larger portion of the system. This means, as noted in the section on access, populations that can cover the cost of enhanced service will receive it first, while more remote communities may not receive it at all or face considerably higher costs for the same service, unless specific interventions by government or other agencies subsidize the cost of serving smaller and/ or more remote communities.

Other technology initiatives

CANARIE, the Canadian Network for the Advancement of Research, Industry and Education, a federal/industry coalition to explore potential applications of the new communications and information technologies, projects an investment of about $900 million in public and private sector funds in network upgrading, product development, establishment of a test network, and its own administration.³¹

Who is paying for all this?

These are just some examples of some of the costs associated with building advanced communications systems that can be used for business applications and for learning. In many cases, the public will be paying for these expenditures, whether they are made by the private or public sector, and our share of these costs may show up on our tax bills, phone bills, or cable bills at any time in the near future.

There appears to be no immediate plan on the part of either 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 may be somewhat easier to pin down the costs of new learning technologies at the institutional level, because educational providers that use "old" and/or "new" technologies to provide access 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" technologies were equivalent to, and sometimes lower than, the costs for serving on-site students. As well, the costs for providing learning opportunities by distance education are also generally much lower than the costs of providing traveling instructors to offer courses in communities, unless there are special funding arrangements in place and/or costs are shared between the host community and the educational provider.

Some examples of equipment costs

The costs of the newer learning technologies tend to be considerably higher than the costs of technologies used for some years to provide flexible and open learning. For example, real time conferencing allows learners and instructors in different locations to have a direct conversation; in other words, listeners hear the speaker's message at the same time as it is sent, as in a face to face conversation.³² The capital costs of basic equipment for audio conferencing have been estimated at $5,100 per site, increasing to $10,200 per site for audio graphics. But it costs $20,000 to $30,000 per site for interactive videoconferencing³³ that uses phone lines.