Co-designing a community-led Internet assessment tool in Rigolet, Nunatsiavut, Canada

Inequitable access to telecommunication networks is having discernible impacts on Canadians, particularly in Northern and remote communities. More complete, available, and interoperable datasets are needed to better quantify inequitable access, particularly at the ‘last mile’ of the internet. Community-based internet assessment initiatives have been recognized as valuable programs in this pursuit. The Rigolet Internet Assessment Initiative (RIAI) is a project located in and led by the Inuit of Rigolet, Nunatsiavut, to measure and better understand the community’s telecommunications environment. The RIAI data collection began in 2019 and involves collecting measurements every twenty minutes from ten participating households. Using participatory design methods, this paper describes the co-creation of the initiative, the design of the system and development of the software suite, deployment of the integrated hardware tools, and analysis of a sample of the resulting dataset. As a result of this work, an additional 9,436 measurements were added to databases of publicly available download and upload speeds for the community of Rigolet (where only 2 existed prior) where they can be used to support data-driven policy. Further, findings indicate that the quality of internet in Rigolet is far below the Canadian Radio and Telecommunications Commission’s upload and download speed goals.