[Mikkel Paulson]

I'm not sure the technical details are what we should be hashing out. Like and good government, we should make a new department, throw money at it, and say "sort it out".

[Concerned Citizen]

I'm not sure the technical details are what we should be hashing out. Like and good government, we should make a new department, throw money at it, and say "sort it out".

Thats how you create waste in the first place. Because you end up with a department filled with cronies who dont know what to do so they spend it on bonuses and stuff.

[Mikkel Paulson]

As opposed to letting politicians who don't know what to do call the shots?

[Jay Frank]

I'm not sure the technical details are what we should be hashing out. Like and good government, we should make a new department, throw money at it, and say "sort it out".

This is how you end up with a nut costing $30 and a bolt $50 - the union labor to screw it in at least 1 hr @ $40.
Call this a military project and it would work.

J

[Mikkel Paulson]

I'd rather risk spending $30 on a nut that works than $30,000,000,000 on an infrastructure upgrade that isn't going to work because a bunch of idiots on the internet decided that it was the only way to go.

[Jay Frank]

I'm not disagreeing with you that the Gov is not capable of rolling this kind of idea out.
Hence my skepticism.  How well u think the US will react to not controlling our Canadian Internet?
(Who cares is not an answer)

J

[Mikkel Paulson]

Better than they would to us fixing copyright law. I wonder if that's enough to convince us them that we're a rogue state with weapons of mass destruction that needs to be dealt with in the name of freedom and democracy.

Edit: fixed silly mistake

[Nuitari]

The point is not to have a debate on the specific technology, but to have the whole idea in principle. Network engineer can work out the specific technological implementation.

Having said that, the fiber could easily be overland from Montreal to Cote-Nord then take a dip to connect Labrador & Newfoundland and go onward to Iceland, UK, France, Belgium and Holland.

Of course, a question I've always wondered is which is cheaper between an overland or an undersea cable ?

[Mikkel Paulson]

Undersea I imagine. Overland requires trenching and infrastructure replacements/upgrades.

[Concerned Citizen]

I say use a mix of technologies. Sure Fiber is great due to it's 'heavy lifting capacity' but Satellite has the advantage of once you put the thing in orbit you can readjust the beamdown location for the information.

[Yehoshua]

I think this is something that merits the effort of at least investigating a very rough approximation of cost - we can't really be calling for Quebec City-Paris, or Vancouver-Japan fibreoptic cables being a priority over the next five years if we can't offer even the basic cost. Once we know the basic cost, we can decide as a party whether or not it seems worth the $X. "If $X were freed up in a government cancellation tomorrow, would we rather insist it go towards anti-DRM or DIgital Sovereignty?"

Once we have the roughest approximation of cost, if we think it is a solid platform idea, I would be interested in working on a more in-depth analysis of the issue, even drafting up a report on the issue, with recommendations and warnings - it strikes me as a wonderful report to release publicly - positive  publicity on an area of the digital world that most people have never considered...but in the current economic throes south of the border...are likely to support.

[Nuitari]

Platforms are rarely written with specific costs for each point.

Plus we'd have to quantify the cost of losing Internet access to Europe, Asia and South America too.

[Yehoshua]

We don't need absolute numbers, but we need to be able to say whether it will cost 10 million, 100 million, 10 billion, 100 billion, etc.

[Mikkel Paulson]

Hundreds of millions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_communications_cable#Importance_of_Submarine_Cables
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2008/02/googles-submari/

Jay, take note:

As of 2006, overseas satellite links accounted carried only 1 percent of international traffic, while the remainder was carried by undersea cable. The reliability of submarine cables is high, especially when (as noted above), multiple paths are available in the event of a cable break. Also, the total carrying capacity of submarine cables is in the terabits per second while satellites typically offer only megabits per second and display higher latency.

Maybe you could invent a better, more reliable satellite uplink system, but as a political party, we have to base our platform and cost estimates on what technology is available now.

[Yehoshua]

There are currently five undersea fibreoptic cables connecting Canada around the world - three of them have Wikipedia articles, two do not

ANZCAN (Canada- to Australia) - http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=ANZCAN_(cable_system)

CANTAT-3 - (Nova Scotia to Iceland/England/Denmark/Germany) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANTAT-3

FLAG FP-1 - (Canada to Japan/USA) http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=FP-1_(cable_system)

Greenland Connect (Canada to Greenaldn/Iceland) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_Connect

Hibernia Atlantic (Canada to England, Ireland, USA) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hibernia_Atlantic

It might be wise for PPCA to spend a week or two researching and updating these articles, if we were serious about moving towards a Digital Sovereignty platform - so that we gain and organise knowledge ourselves, about exactly what we're advocating and why.