ON-DEMAND: Turning Points of Conflict into Points of Cohesion with Infrastructure Ontario [an Energy Central PowerTalk™ with Infrastructure Ontario]

Energy Central PowerTalks are 20-30 minute pre-recorded video and/or audio sessions focused on case study stories, white paper research, or topics that we feel may interest the community.

In this PowerTalk "Turning Points of Conflict into Points of Cohesion with Infrastructure Ontario," Ron Jaikaran, Director of Commercial Advisory & Strategy at Infrastructure Ontario discuss with Energy Central's Community Manager, Matt Chester, how the organization turned an innovative broadband project into an opportunity for collaboration on the Accelerated High Speed Internet Program (AHSIP).

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In the comments section at the end of this post, please feel free to ask questions, add comments, etc. If you have questions, the Energy Central Community Management team will do their best to get answers from the presenters and other community members.

Interviewees

Ron Jaikaran, Director of Commercial Advisory & Strategy at Infrastructure Ontario

Related Topic Posts on Energy Central

Broadband Innovation and Collaboration Leads to Improved Connectivity Across Ontario

PowerTalk Transcript

Matt Chester:

Hello, my name is Matt Chester, Community Manager at Energy Central. Energy Central is a platform built to help professionals in the utility industry to share, learn, and connect in a collaborative environment. Our Power Talk Series is filled with short 20 to 30-minute pre-recorded video sessions aimed to bring together some of the leading voices on given topics that we feel will be of interest to the power sector widely, and the energycentral.com community specifically. We invite our members to interact with these Power Talk sessions afterwards by leaving comments and questions on the posts, which our Power Talk participants will respond to, so that the conversation can continue. Now, I'm pleased to kick off today's Power Talk session.

Our Power Talks predominantly are meant to center around case studies, bringing tangible successes to the forefront so that across the utility sector, we can identify the lessons learned that might most apply to different areas, and to push the boundaries of what we think is possible by seeing what has already been done and use that as a way to ground our conversations. Today, I'm excited to welcome Ron Jaikaran to this Power Talk session. Ron is Director of Commercial Advisory and Strategy at Infrastructure Ontario. Ron recently shared a post on the Energy Central Community titled Broadband Innovation and Collaboration Leads to Improved Connectivity Across Ontario, a piece that gained considerable excitement from our community. And so, it certainly seemed worth diving into on the next level via this Power Talk.

Ron, thank you for participating today. We'll link to that article that I just mentioned in the notes section for the session, but for those who maybe haven't read it yet, can you give us maybe the clip notes of what message you were trying to share there?

Ron Jaikaran:

Yeah, absolutely. Well, first off, Matt, thank you and to the Energy Central team for having me here today. I appreciate the opportunity to share our experience and insights with the community. The article you're referring to was one that highlights some of the innovations that our province has implemented to build broadband infrastructure faster. Our government committed nearly $4 billion to connect every region of the province to reliable high-speed internet by the end of 2025, which is the largest single investment in high-speed internet by any province, by any government in Canadian history.

It's a bold commitment that requires bold solutioning. Delivering a program of this magnitude requires unprecedented collaboration across a number of sectors. Our approach at IO is underpinned and really focuses on three critical components, people, process, and technology. That was really the main emphasis of the article, to highlight that intersection of innovative solutioning, establishing partnerships and processes that are all enabled by our unique digital platform, the Broadband One Window, allowing us to turn points of conflict that existed in the past into points of cohesion moving forward.

Matt Chester:

Wonderful. We appreciate that background. I want to take a quick step back and get some more of your background. Can you give the audience a quick tour through your role with Infrastructure Ontario and what it is you do day to day?

Ron Jaikaran:

Absolutely. I've spent over 10 years in government in a number of capacities, primarily in finance and treasury roles. I've led the development of our annual provincial budget. I've supported the government with securing strategic investments with companies to support economic growth and development, and later shifted towards working on energy and electricity sector policy. I then joined Infrastructure Ontario and we're a crown agency of the province that strives to partner with the public and private sector to create a more connected modern and competitive infrastructure landscape. We do that by delivering commercial solutions, executing transactions, and managing the assets on behalf of the government. In my role specifically at IO, I lead the delivery and execution of Ontario's Accelerated High-Speed Internet Program or AHSIP. It's one of the key pillars of that $4 billion government strategy that I mentioned that aims to connect homes and businesses across Ontario.

Matt Chester:

Excellent. I want to hear more about the AHSIP program and specifically what it means to you and your team at IO.

Ron Jaikaran:

That's a great question, Matt, and maybe before I answer, I'll take a step back and provide a bit of context for why the program came up and came about. The digital divide is a challenge that jurisdictions faced around the world. Many of us here in Ontario have access to high-speed internet, use it daily, and really don't think twice about it. It's been several years now, but the COVID-19 pandemic really amplified the issue of the digital divide here in Ontario. Governments around the world implemented public safety measures that saw most businesses close, schools and other venues close their physical locations as well. This meant that people had to participate in the economy virtually, whether that was working from home or taking classes online or whatever it may be.

However, there were many parts of our province that had no access to high-speed internet, and those that had service below our national service standard of 50/10 service, so unserved or underserved across Ontario. In today's economy, access to fast and reliable broadband internet is, it's an essential service and that should be available to everyone no matter where they live, so that everyone can participate in today's digital economy. This really became an opportunity for the government to take bold action to close the digital divide and close it quickly. Like I said earlier, the commitment was to provide access across the province by the end of 2025. When you think about it, that's really, it's only 32 months away. Here in Ontario, that's three construction seasons, given the winters that we have here. There are already existing application-based programs that the government had that ISPs could apply and secure grant funding to connect premises. This worked to an extent, but left challenging gaps in services across Ontario. These were the most remote premises, often with challenging terrain to build over in very high-cost areas of the province.

To put that in perspective, the size of our province, or for our American viewers equivalent to a state, our geographic area is 1.5, one and a half times bigger than the size of Texas. Our capital, Toronto is the fourth largest city and one of the fastest growing in all of North America. Our province really is the economic hub for Canada, just to give you a sense of the scale and scope of the project. IO was tasked with finding an innovative solution to close the remaining gaps in service. We tapped into the market to pinpoint challenges to deploying broadband infrastructure and develop commercial solutions that included a series of reverse auctions, where internet service providers could bid for government subsidies, the lowest bid one. They were bidding to connect defined geographic regions that IO had mapped using extensive modeling. We ultimately executed pay for performance contract with eight providers to connect over 266,000 homes and businesses.

Now, when you break it down, it's about as many as 420 separate network deployments all happening across the province at the same time that requires a massive amount of collaboration with over 400 municipalities, 50 utility companies across Ontario, contractors, suppliers, and more. 90% of those deployments are fiber-based, which was an outcome that we were heavily biased towards to ensure that the infrastructure being built would be future-proof. Through the program, we're expecting to deploy about 51,000 kilometers or 31,700 miles of fiber across Ontario. That's more than the circumference of the earth.

Back to your question, what does it mean to me and to my team? It's tackling that digital divide, bringing greater digital inclusivity, enabling stronger participation in our digital economy. There's so many positive outcomes that can be achieved with greater broadband penetration. Leveraging public and private partnerships to develop those innovative solutions that ultimately optimize the outcome for our citizens is really what the program means to me.

Matt Chester:

Absolutely. No, that's very well said, and your passion for the topic definitely comes through. You mentioned collaboration and partnership in there, so I'll kind of steer into that. The title of our session today talks about turning conflict into cohesion, tension into collaboration. I'd love if you could elaborate on that. From a technical standpoint, how did this project deliver on that kind of collaboration? Then, from a personality level, how do you achieve something like that?

Ron Jaikaran:

That's a great question. A perspective that our company, IO, brings to all of its projects is that private sector lens to tackle some of government's toughest challenges. When you think about our stakeholders ecosystem that we needed to collaborate with, some of the ones that I mentioned, it's well over 500 partners, all with their own requirements, their own challenges, their own biases, and we needed to work with all of them to ensure that we're aligned. We engaged the market in a couple ways to begin to identify some of those pain points and develop solutions.

The first was around a market sounding to help design a competitive procurement process and those reverse auctions that would foster a fair and open competition amongst our national, regional, and local internet service providers. We were able to solicit feedback to inform the way we structured that transaction to incentivize our ISPs to build infrastructure under these extremely tight timelines. That was one way we brought cohesion to the commercial solution with the market offering.

I would say the second form of market engagement that was extremely important was we brought together what we called a technical working group. This was a table or a forum that consisted of representatives from ISPs, municipalities, utilities, government departments, industry associations and more. We brought them all together and created a forum to discuss a number of topics. We also brought in an industry expert, an independent chair to chair the working group sessions. We hosted a number of meetings over the summer. Through that table we're able to identify a number of pain points that were faced by the various stakeholders responsible at the various stages of the project.

Bringing in that market view and input early into the problem solving was critical. We heard clearly from the market that it wasn't just capital subsidies from the government. They helped to an extent, but didn't solve some of the concerns. Getting down into the technical processes, we learned that changing the rules and implementing new processes had significant value. Through that working group, we came up with over 35 recommendations, a mix of legislative regulatory process changes and other mechanisms to help enhance collaboration and coordination amongst all these players.

We actually looked at other jurisdictions, especially what was happening in the United States, the Federal Communications Commission, the FCC, around making it easier to attach to utility poles in creating a one-touch make ready process. We modeled some of our recommendations and implemented similar solutions to accelerate our infrastructure build here in Ontario. We worked with our public policy partners in government to create a legislative framework that enables that greater collaboration and cohesion. Really, one of the key success factors of that working group, I would say, is having a clearly defined problem statement connecting every region by the end of 2025, and a government that was willing to challenge the status quo thinking, and make bold changes to help reduce red tape. This really helped build trust among industry and the working group and ISPs that we were willing to advocate for change, we're committed to the program, and it ultimately contributed to the success of our market offer.

Matt Chester:

Absolutely, and that's great to hear. You mentioned a couple times there, the government role and the public role. I'm kind of curious if you can dive into how was the legislative framework enabled early on in that collaborative process? You mentioned how some of the benefits of that, but speak to how that process came about.

Ron Jaikaran:

That's a great question. The legislative and regulatory changes that were implemented was, it was a significant accomplishment. There were five key pieces of legislation or regulations that were either introduced or amended to create this overall legislative architectures as we refer to it. When you think about what goes into broadband deployment and the intersection points where multiple parties are involved, it's quite a complicated web. I mentioned there's 444 municipalities, each with their own capital plans, processes for reviewing and approving permits. We've got requirements for underground locates to be done to identify buried infrastructure before excavations can happen. We've got 60 utility companies, an arms length energy regulator, the Ontario Energy Board. It's the utility companies that grant access to the poll.

We looked at the end-to-end process and identified areas where conflict, delays, and issues could arise. What we did was we introduced service standards and timelines for municipalities to issue permits for utility companies to grant access to polls, and for locate companies to identify underground infrastructure while ensuring the validity period for those locates was extended. All of these pieces worked together to help speed up deployments and gave our partners time to collaborate more effectively. We mandated data sharing here in Ontario so that stakeholders could share infrastructure data with ISPs to facilitate earlier network and routing and planning, all in an effort to speed up deployment.

Another insight that we learned early on, changing the rules wasn't enough. It was a game changer, but we had to educate and bring awareness to all sectors to ensure there was adoption and adherence to this new regime that we created. We used a comprehensive strategy to engage folks at varying levels of all these different organizations to make sure that all these rule changes that we made, all the new process improvements were well understood, the changes were communicated, and the implications were understood so that everyone partaking in the process could take advantage.

We connected internet service providers to stakeholders directly that they'd be working with. We created tools and resources to support our stakeholders. We hosted training and onboarding sessions. We worked with the government to publish a comprehensive guideline documenting all the new processes and legislative changes. That was a massive effort. We're now seeing the fruits of our labor. We're seeing internet service providers engage with their stakeholders earlier. They're sharing information, they're having those dialogues, they're ironing out issues earlier before they escalate into disputes.

Planning and permitting activities are happening faster, approvals are taking place within those legislative timelines that we created. It is an iterative process. We continue to engage with industry, we continue to seek their feedback from the various sectors, and we try to work with them on ways we can further clarify, clear path, and clarify some of the rule changes, and if needed, make adjustments to that legislative framework that we created just to continuously improve and make it a smoother process for broadband deployment.

Matt Chester:

It sounds like sometimes with such a large deployment, there might be a push and pull between thoroughness and efficiency, but it looks like you've been able to achieve both. And so, I'm curious about the efficiency side of it and how AHSIP supported stakeholders of the program to ensure that timely deployment of broadband infrastructure across the province was achieved.

Ron Jaikaran:

That's a great question. Now, the legislative framework is one of those big support pieces. There are maybe two other innovations that I could touch on. The first is our Broadband One Window platform. This was actually the focus of the article that was featured on the Energy Central site. The platform, the BOW, as we call it, Broadband One Window, was introduced to all parties involved in the delivery of high-speed internet. It allows them to design, procure, construct, manage those projects. It's an integral innovation that enhances coordination and communication all in a one-stop shop platform. It integrates leading technologies, geospatial mapping, analytics, cloud infrastructure.

It's the first digital platform that was legally mandated for use. The platform helps drive transparency in the way our stakeholders are in interacting. We can track how they're adhering to those legislative timelines that we introduced. We can see how they're engaging on permitting and sharing data. We can see what the timelines are like for approvals and we can predict where we might need to actually intervene or where potential disputes might arise it. It really gives us a window into all the behind the scenes activities that we usually wouldn't have insights into. It hosts our poll and utility data for ISPs to plan their routes and seek approvals. That's one of the big support tools that we have.

The other one, I would say, and we're really proud of is we established what is called a technical assistance team. This is something we heard from the feedback in the working group sessions we had with the market early on is that there needed to be a help desk function to help all these stakeholders navigate the process. Not all of them understand how to deploy broadband infrastructure. Some of them aren't aware at all or don't have any processes in place. We assembled a team of subject matter experts from various sectors, most of which I mentioned municipal utility. We've got urban planning experts, engineers, broadband, network design experts and more.

That team is actively working with our entire stakeholder ecosystem to answer questions, provide permitting support, provide guidance to stakeholders on technical issues. They're really the one-stop shop for any technical assistance, understanding the legislative framework. That team is really closely plugged in with our ISPs and they're keeping a pulse on the progress. The team is also available to support early and informal dispute resolution. Looking at that Broadband One Window platform, technical assistance team can track cases and observe the flow of information and interactions. Going back to what I said at the top of the call, we've really centered our approach around those three key elements, people, the technical assistance team, the process driven by the innovations and the legislative changes, and technology underpinned by our Broadband One Window platform.

Matt Chester:

Wonderful, I appreciate you kind of bringing it full circle there. If I can end on a question to make this actionable for our viewers and our community, let's say someone's watching our session and they're early on in the process of following these types of footsteps, what kind of advice would you offer based on the lessons that you learned along the way?

Ron Jaikaran:

That's a great question and I've tried to articulate some of that throughout our chat. I think setting clear, well-defined policy objectives and using that lens to assess every aspect of the project. In our case, the policy objective was clearly defined, understood by everyone, communicated to all partners. We all knew the goal we were working towards and the parameters we were working with.

Second, I would probably say be risk-aware and outcomes-focused. At Infrastructure Ontario, we have a culture of really focusing in on de-risking program delivery. We don't shy away from risk. We focus on how we can mitigate them while keeping an eye on the project outcomes and make sure we're driving towards that and mitigating along the way.

Finally, I would say early and ongoing engagement with your delivery partners across the ecosystem. This was a critical success factor for us tapping into their experience, the insights. They really helped us create solutions and that's really what were considered past pain points, and that's what helped us turn those past pain points into points of cohesion and collaboration. So, yeah, working with the market early on.

Matt Chester:

Wonderful. Well, Ron, I think we've fit quite a few learning opportunities for our viewers today into this conversation, though I'm sure for many, we've only really just scratched the surface and piqued their interest. I do hope and invite the Energy Central community to share their comments and questions on AHSIP and your experience in its implementation, and that you'll be open to keeping that conversation going with them.

Ron Jaikaran:

Absolutely. I'm more than happy to. Thank you for having me today. It was a pleasure.

Matt Chester:

Of course. Thank you for joining us today and thanks to all those who are watching or listening in, and stay tuned for future editions of the Energy Central Power Talk series as well. That concludes our session today. Thanks.

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