Rural communities are going to be playing a larger role in the province's economic future thanks in part to advances in wireless technology, experts say.

The change, which will result in a shifting of economic benefits to smaller regions, is already underway, a panel on the implications of new wireless broadband technologies heard last week in Edmonton.

Information and communications technology (ICT) is about to redraw the way business is done as centralized large-scale systems give way to decentralized smaller-scale counterparts, said Mike Hollinshead, president of Facing the Future Inc., a management consulting firm.

"There will be a switch from the Ford concept where everything is done on one site. Today, they do assembly and perhaps major component manufacturing while everything else is offsite. This is what ICT did," Hollinshead noted during a panel discussion hosted by the Edmonton Council for Advanced Technology (ECAT).

The Alberta SuperNet, a high-speed broadband infrastructure connecting every provincial government office, school, health facility and library in the province, is only one part of a picture that is changing on a global basis, the audience heard.

Decentralizing will come about, said Hollinshead, because it will also be more cost effective, as companies can escape the need to replace their aging, expensive equipment. In turn, that means bringing some of these services closer to the communities that use them and will create "a revival in the rural economy around new industries.”

This paradigm shift, where radical technology delivers change, is not a continuous process, he added.

"It occurs in clusters that take place 50-60 years apart," said Hollinshead.

Between 2005-2010, he added, changes will also be spurred as technology enables the Internet to become more than a medium that connects people to other people. "It will connect things together - when our homes become digitized or when things like sensors keep track of where our cows are.”

Helping to power this transformation will be new wireless technologies, such as the worldwide interoperability for microwave access, otherwise known as WiMAX.

It will enable wireless broadband access to reach further than existing technology allows, and is said to reduce deployment costs. WiMAX is also expected to help overcome security concerns in current wireless systems.

Other panelists at the ECAT event included Denis Lemire, director of technical operations for high-speed wireless provider Triton AirSurfer; Eric Larson, marketing director for NEWT (Network for Emerging Wireless Technologies); and Dave Ehman, director of SuperNet operations for Axia SuperNet Ltd.

Toronto-based TeraGo Networks, a fixed wireless provider that has just expanded its network into Edmonton and has an operations and IT base in Calgary, is paying attention to all the talk about change.

"On the demand side, we heard some very interesting trends," said TeraGo's president and CEO Bryan Boyd, who was also part of the ECAT panel. "When that starts to occur, there's just a massive increase and explosion in terms of demand because all of these very smart devices need to communicate.

In the near future, Boyd added, new chips and technologies such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) will allow operators such as TeraGo to do a whole lot more for less money.

"The key thing there is that the cost to reach a customer is going down, and as the cost goes down that means we can approach a customer that is further away from the main centres," said Boyd.

"So these new chips, this new technology, plus the lower cost as a result of a SuperNet backbone, is only going to help us.”

Boyd said that as with anything else, how fast the changes will occur in Alberta depends on how much capital is raised.

But it also will depend on the resource sector, added Hollinshead, who said energy companies will likely develop sensors to better help them do their work by relaying data from the field - information that will need to be sent over telecommunications networks across rural Alberta.

As such, other communications systems will be able to use the network infrastructure, he added, which will also result in repair and maintenance opportunities that will create employment and spinoff jobs.

(Laura Severs can be reached at laura@businessedge.ca)