CONNECTING NUNAVUT
Fibre optics pitched as online link
IQALUIT Dennis Patterson is the only senator in Nunavut, but that doesn’t mean he and his family can access decent, affordable Internet in their homes in Iqaluit.
As Patterson and his adult son George clean kelp off a fishing net they used to catch Arctic char in Frobisher Bay on a gusty August afternoon, George explains he doesn’t bother with home Internet since the price is too ridiculous to justify the paltry service. Instead, he relies on his cellphone (about $100 per month) and swaps hard drives with friends to share media.
“We don’t live or die by the Internet, but, boy, our lives would be different if we just had it,” he said. “We feel out of the loop.”
Dennis, appointed to the Senate by the Conservatives in 2009, said the archaic speeds are crippling economic development. He hopes to change that by throwing his weight behind the latest pitch to get Nunavut communities connected with a submarine fibreoptic cable to the main grid.
The idea is technically feasible — Greenland and Norway have submarine cable connections — but comes with a billion-dollar price tag that has proven to be a major hurdle to overcome in the past. This time, however, its backers are getting creative financially.
A group of Inuit organizations from Nunavut, Northwest Territories, Nunavik and Nunatsiavut has asked the federal government to tweak its rules to make broadband and connectivity projects eligible for funding under the national infrastructure component of the Building Canada Fund.
Their goal is to build a pan-Arctic telecom backbone, ideally using undersea fibre optic cable networks and/or land-based microwave tower networks, and sell wholesale access to it to telecoms. This would end the reliance on expensive satellite networks into which companies and the government have poured millions, but comes with an upfront cost of between $600 million and $1 billion. The investment would boost Nunavut’s GDP by an estimated $15 million to $50 million annually, according to reports from the Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency and the Nunavut Broadband Development Corp.
As it stands, funding for the project is available only under the provincial-territorial infrastructure component or through public-private partnerships. Neither would come even close to covering the project’s entire cost, especially since governments in satellite-dependent communities have already earmarked funds for other projects.
Connecting Canadians, a separate $305-million fund for rural and remote broadband launched under the Conservatives and topped up with $500 million in the 2016 budget, is also a non-starter based on its size and mandate to spread the money across the country.
If broadband fell under the national infrastructure component of the fund, Ottawa could technically cover up to 75 per cent of the project. But the Liberals could change the structure of that fund entirely. In a statement, Infra- structure Canada said individual project reviews are temporarily suspended as it reviews the entire program to ensure it fits with its larger $120-billion infrastructure plan. Details, including eligibility criteria, will be announced in the next year.
The key, Patterson said as he packed away the fishing net, is for Canadians to think of the fibre connection as the North’s replacement railway.
The North has not benefited from past infrastructure investments that Canadian governments have made to build the country, so now it wants a cyber-highway.
“When the transcontinental railway was built, when the TransCanada Highway was built, the north was left out,” he said. “Now it’s our turn.”
There’s already a sizable group of potential customers that would happily switch to fibre including users from the three levels of bureaucrats (government is the largest employer in the North), the Canadian High Arctic Research Station in Cambridge Bay and National Defence. Paying for satellite is like throwing money in a black hole, Patterson said.
“There’s no infrastructure that is a legacy of all that expense. You just keep buying satellite time until it dies, and then you pay exorbitant amounts to have someone put up a new satellite,” he said.
The service provided by satellite systems from Northwestel Inc., SSI Micro Ltd. through Qiniq and Ice Wireless, while improving, is still primitive compared with the south. Plus there’s no backup. Five years ago, Nunavut and large swaths of the North were in the dark for hours when Telesat Canada’s satellite malfunctioned.
“The impact was staggering,” Patterson said. “It stopped any flights in the airport, it stopped any commercial purchases, it was no longer possible to make purchases with anything but cash here.”
Nunavut’s population is too small for a commercially viable fibre cable, but Patterson believes such a connection is key to economic, social and health development in the North.
Adamee Itorcheak, a serial entrepreneur who started the first Internet service provider in Nunavut by reselling a dial-up connection, isn’t sold on throwing all the government funding into one megaproject.
Itorcheak points at government projects that are over-budget or lacked foresight. There’s no shortage of examples. But Itorcheak, who currently works in aviation logistics and tourism, still believes fibre, or at least a modern Internet connection, is essential for Inuit communities. “Telecom should be right up there with housing and schooling,” he said.
We don’t live or die by the Internet, but, boy, our lives would be different if we just had it. We feel out of the loop.