Northern line could connect territories to fibre-optic broadband

A new fibre-optic line planned to connect London to Tokyo is expected to improve connectivity in the 43 northern Canadian communities currently served by satellite. The Kodiak Kenai Cable Company, based in Alaska, has undertaken a project worth an estimated $1.2 billion to connect Europe to Asia with a fibre-optic cable that will traverse the Northwest Passage. “For the first time, it is an opportunity to bring an awful lot of remote communities into a fibre-based, and therefore state-of-the-art, telecommunications system,” said Ik Icard, a technical business consultant with Kodiak. Ikard said the main impetus for the project is to reduce network latency between Europe and Asia nearly by half. Icard said there are currently two fibre-optic lines that connect both continents. But several network management facilities have caused higher latency, which on both lines is about 140 milliseconds. The new cable would bring latency down to an average of 80 milliseconds. Less latency means that more advanced applications can function on the network. A portion of the cable will be laid on the ocean floor in the Northwest Passage. That portion has been dubbed the ArticLink, and will consist of 16,000 km of underwater fibre-optic cable. Kodiak Kenai has been in talks with carriers in Alaska and Canada’s northern territories to use the cable to connect small, isolated communities to the network. Kodiak Kenai has contacted is Northwestel, a subsidiary of Bell Canada that offers phone, wireless, Internet and television services in the North. “Northwestel, I understand, is particularly interested ,” Icard said. But Anne Kennedy, a spokeswoman for Northwestel, said the company is only in early-stage talks about the potential to connect to the fibre-optic network. “If the potential is there to lead to cost savings, or reliability, we’re definitely interested,” Kennedy said. Icard said the availability of a fibre-optic network in the North would add significant reliability to communications services and applications. There are 43 communities in Canada’s northern territories that depend on satellites for long distance phone calls and Internet. While the communities have their own local telephone distribution networks, the dependence on satellites for long distance networking has its disadvantages. During the spring and fall equinox in the North, there are short periods of time when satellite signals are disrupted by the sun’s orientation to the Earth. Kennedy said the disruptions are rare, however, and occur during two 20 minute windows per year. Patrick Doyle, CEO and executive director of the Nunavut Broadband Development Corporation (NBDC), a non-profit organization that provides broadband access to Nunavut residents, said some studies show that satellite broadband can be up to 100 times more costly than fibre-optics per unit of data transferred. The higher cost and bandwidth limitations associated with satellite mean that speeds are much lower and prices are higher than broadband services in Canada’s large urban centres. The NBDC, in conjunction with SSi Micro Ltd., administers a high-speed Internet service called Qiniq. The basic plan provides Nunavut residents download speeds of 384Kbps for $60 a month—which does not qualify as broadband Internet according to CRTC guidelines. For the same price, a Rogers Internet customer can get an advertised download speed that is about 26 times faster, at 10Mbps. The Qiniq service has 5,000 clients in Nunavut, where the total population is 30,000. Doyle said connecting the territories to a fibre-optic network would reduce prices drastically and make Internet access a more viable option for Nunavut’s residents. “Perhaps more importantly, it opens up the possibilities for distance education and for e-health,” Doyle said. “Services that are immensely difficult to deliver in small communities become much more viable.” jmigneault@thewirereport.ca

Northern line could connect territories to fibre-optic broadband

News | 03/04/2010 10:45 pm EST

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