By Larry Frolick -- High-speed Internet in the territories – a mere four years old in most of Nunavut – is under increasing strain from high demand. The laying of fibre optic cable isn’t the only option for improving it. UHB takes a look at what can be done to wire the North.

Sometime in the summer of 2009, a French ship will enter the harbour of tiny Milton, Newfoundland and drop a cable on the stony beach. Inside will be the new Old World.

Called the Greenland Connect Project, the submerged cable stretching from Europe to North America consists of an amplified dual fibre link with state-of-the-art amplifiers and terminal equipment providing a transmission capacity in the range of 600 to 1,000 gigabytes per second. The tiny hamlet is among the key “frozen decisions” – the rigorously surveyed North Atlantic landing sites – that will supplement Europe’s connections with the Americas through a newly reliable communications network, one without the inherent and increasingly problematic delay of satellite links.

It will also bring huge benefits to Greenland.

“Our vision is Greenland in the centre of the world,” says Jorn Jespersen, Greenland Connect’s chief technical officer. “Our current satellite capacity is only 250 megabytes per second, so we are suffering from limited Internet capacity and low-speed services with satellite latency. This creates a huge negative for business applications. The only way forward is submarine cable, which has a planned capacity of more than 7,000 times the current availability. I can’t imagine future growth will saturate this capacity ever.”

The plan calls for the six-inch thick cable to be buried at water depths in excess of 1,500 metres as it crosses the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The project’s lead contractor, Alcatel-Lucent of France, is receiving the lion’s share of the project’s installation costs, budgeted by Tele Greenland at $154-million (U.S.). The new system is expected to last a minimum of 25 years, with an annual maintenance cost of $150 (U.S.) per kilometre per year and an estimated repair cost of $150,000 (U.S.) per year.

These are the hard costs, but what are the hard results? What tangible benefits will increased communications capacity bring to Greenland, a vast territory – like Canada’s North – consisting of dozens of isolated coastal communities? Can high technology enable Arctic residents to leapfrog over traditional development strategies and win the global race for economic security?

On the far side of the continent from Newfoundland, Megan Williams faces another day as heritage manager of Old Crow’s Vuntut Gwich’in government in the Yukon.

“We’ve had high speed Internet here since 2001,” she says, “but it is slower than you would expect for high speed.” Like many people living in the North, Williams relies on the DHS satellite service for a broad range of social and economic choices.

“We use the Internet all day,” she says. “Many households have Internet at home and there are public access computers at the first nations office and the local college campus. We use the Internet for video conferencing, health video conferencing, Skype and distance education. We shop on the Internet, everything from eBay to groceries from Whitehorse. We buy air tickets online and converse with stores about purchases via e-mail. Lots of people, especially young people, use Facebook and Bebo. We stream video and radio stations and download music and movies.”

With a permanent population of only 300, Old Crow is typical of many Canadian communities north of the Arctic Circle: big heart, scant municipal infrastructure, and smart people with time on their hands for much of the year. What if they were empowered with fatter bandwidth and super-fast connections to the world? What could they do with immediate access to everything?

“Information systems sustain community self-reliance and bring immediate economic benefits,” declares Ryan Walker, CEO of SSI Micro, a wireless provider based in Yellowknife. His firm installed the Qiniq DHS system in Nunavut in 2004 with the support of a federal government subsidy. Now, after Herculean efforts from his team of managers and local Community Service Providers (CSPs), the Qiniq covers two million square kilometres, with broadband satellite service connecting 25 communities.

“Our customers told us the single most important infrastructure outlay in Nunavut was the Qiniq,” Walker says. “It opened new possibilities for everyone. And in our case it also put $500,000 straight back into the community from local service-rep fees.”

Among the 30 Nunavut residents who jumped at the chance to become a CSP was entrepreneur Darrell Ohokannoak of Cambridge Bay, who is now looking to get more bandwidth for his community (see sidebar, p. 33). Walker says such team members are critical to the project’s success.

Compared to other capital-intensive Northern projects, such as the $725-million earmarked for housing development for Nunavut, or the proposed Manitoba to Nunavut highway, estimated to cost in excess of one million dollars per kilometre, wiring the North is relatively cheap and demand is huge, if not insatiable.

“Our growth projections for Qiniq were met by year one and a half,” Walker says. “We knew the demand was there. Now we are bidding for a 10 MHz block of the wireless spectrum covering the three Northern territories. And we are implementing additional services like VoIP, advanced wireless service, and local hotspots.”

Based on examples like Qiniq’s success, the economic outlook for expanded Internet and mobile services in the North appears rosy and, as some experts insist, will soon become overwhelming. Research by Minnesota Internet Traffic Studies confirms that U.S. and worldwide consumer and business demand expanded by over 50 per cent in 2007, leading analysts to worry about a coming massive Internet jam, nicknamed the “exaflood.” Estimates of immediate growth vary between a low of 50 per cent per year to an exponential annual doubling of demand, forecast by U.S. research firm Nemertes, while Converge! Network Digest claims that present-day, unsatisfied Internet demand is three terabytes per second, 1,000 times existing volume.

Although Canada still sits in the middle of the pack of developed countries for market penetration of new information technologies, scoring seventh of eight markets in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, it is lagging in the area of cost-effective delivery of services. Local businesses suffer as a result. Media analyst Ian Graham, director of Ottawa-based Klondike Consulting, says the Canadian wireless market is capped by a structural “digital divide.”

“Growth of Canada’s cellphone market has been constant at 1.5 million new subscribers per year since 2005, while Internet growth peaked in 2005,” Graham says. “We see a mature market here for cellphones by 2010 or 2112, with the digital divide – the economics of affording high speed, and the technical limits that essentially restrict it to urban and suburban regions – capping Internet growth within that same time frame.”

The current interest for service providers, big and small, is securing more bandwidth, and their techno-hunters are out beating the bushes for new action. In the U.S., the coming switch to digital for TV broadcasters means that the so-called white space, the unused buffer between assigned-station frequencies, is up for grabs as a cheap and useful target niche for service providers. Similarly, dark fibre, the “unlit” or unused capacity of a network cable, has seen its capacity multiplied one-hundredfold by the development of wavelength division multiplexing, which uses the different colours of the light spectrum to send bi-direction signals along a single strand of glass fibre. As a result of such engineered efficiencies, industry experts believe a capacity of 1.7 terabytes per second is achievable on the present infrastructure deployment.

But there is also the issue of market dominance, currently expressed by an insatiable industry appetite for advanced wireless services, or AWS. Bandwidth is not merely a saleable commodity, but it’s also strategic high ground to take and hold against other industry-comers. The two GHz bandwidth, which Industry Canada is presently auctioning off, is one such prime no-man’s land. Record sales of slices of this spectrum have fetched $3.5-billion dollars and are still going strong, with familiar telecom companies like Telus, Rogers, Yak and Bell jockeying for position against Western companies with money to burn.

SSI Micro has its own standalone bid for a Northern slice of the ether pie, and its cash deposit was qualified by the auctioneers along with those of a pack of 30 other commercial bidders. Critics of the Canadian bandwidth system decry the way it’s retailed here, pointing to both the substantially lower costs of mobile services in the U.S. (Canadians pay as much as 56 per cent more, according to a 2007 Seaboard report), and to the superior technology used in Asian markets like Japan and Singapore, where faster four gigabyte cellphones are ubiquitous and contribute to their (arguably) more efficient way of doing business.

The criticism gets especially heated when it focuses on Ottawa’s proposed use of the billion-dollar windfall from the Spectrum Auction, which is earmarked to go into general revenues. Technology advocates want the money to go back into the system.

But some players claim it’s not more money that is needed, but more smarts. Peter Zmudzki, CEO of After Wire, a proprietary software licensor based in Toronto, points out that North America is a relatively mature market, and that existing companies naturally want to squeeze out the last drop of profits from their existing installations.

His new company is eager to help them. “We are looking to deploy our software in places with no or little infrastructure, and to partner with existing service providers to install an umbrella that makes it possible not just for human-to-human communication, but more importantly, seamless machine-to-machine communication. The present bandwidth is big enough for two-way communications of all kinds, and novel IP-to-IP applications will revolutionize society by providing users with real-time data collection.”

By way of example, Zmudzki says that instead of doing after-the-fact, and expensive, physical inspections of municipal-owned inventory – such as garbage trucks or parking metres – a preferred and cost-efficient method of monitoring all such “data collection devices” is through the wireless highway, linking billions of machine Internet addresses, or IPs, to each other. He predicts the system, once completed, will attract the virtual equivalent of hotels, shopping centres, and duty-free shops to it as well, creating an economic multiplier-effect of untold dimensions. Why watch the rust grow on your truck fleet when a two-way IP will do it for you, 24/7, and tell you how much of the ice cap melted last night, as well?

Zmudzki is especially enthusiastic about the possibilities of mobilizing bandwidth to cover everything under the Northern sun. “Real-time monitoring of pets – or Arctic dog teams – and bussed schoolchildren and midnight traffic violators and at-home health cases is all possible, once the umbrella is up. The only limit on transmission will be the end-hardware device itself. A Northern doctor encountering a rare malady in a remote area can access a specialist from anywhere on the ‘highway,’ and get a two-way communication going while he is travelling and without any special hard-wiring.”

Studies like a 2007 report from IDC Canada, a provider of market intelligence on information technology, confirm that the measurable economic benefits of increased connectivity are at least four times initial capital outlay. But what about the social cost and benefits? To get a sense of the newly polymorphic relationship with a suddenly ambient system, it’s instructive to see what industry players are thinking and doing about such “disruptive technology” in their own backyards.

Stephen Rose, director of communications for Yukon’s Department of Economic Development, takes pains to point out there is no single, Northern telecom market. “Nunavut is satellite-based, with some local terrestrial connection; NWT has more terrestrial, in Yellowknife and Hay River; while Yukon is all-terrestrial with satellite service only in Old Crow. Our studies show that 55 per cent of Yukoners are connected, and our present capacity is sufficient,” he says.

“But the single biggest issue we face is completing our fibre optic connection to the South. Staying with digital microwave will throttle development. Our need for bandwidth capacity is going up as we speak, with new mines and information technology companies requiring larger and more secure data transmission capacity.”

Presently there are 70 IT firms located in the Yukon alone, and Rose says they are on the same time zone as Silicon Valley. “We have people here working on Oracle projects in California. They are connected, and they go kayaking on weekends.”

Wanda Leaf, president of Leaf Web Solutions in Whitehorse and a certified meeting planner, agrees, and says she would have no business at all if the system ever failed. “Our office is completely networked and we have our own server. We were probably the first in the North to offer online registration to our conference clients, something a lot of southern firms still do manually. The technology allows us to do meetings of 800 people in Nunavut, Saskatchewan and the NWT, often without meeting the client.”

The company uses an FTP site for delivery of their increasingly large graphic files, a part of the business she says is growing by leaps and bounds as companies move away from print to web-based circulars and brochures. Leaf believes that all Northern firms can benefit from investing in high tech applications no matter how remote they may be. There is only one problem associated with doing an online business in the North:

“We are used to dealing online with clients and employees both. We have two employees – one in B.C., one in Ontario – who do graphic design for us without any communication problems. But what we find difficult is when you have a glitch. It’s hard to find a consultant in the North who can actually come in and look at the problem. You have to describe it online to a distant technician! It’s a task that requires you to study and understand the problem yourself as you work through it. I’d rather be running my business, but maybe it’s just another design opportunity – for someone else!”