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SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
Telecommunications heavyweight Telus Corporation is stepping up its presence in Yellowknife.

Last Friday, Telus launched 4G LTE - the fastest mobile wireless technology currently available in the world - in 14 cities across Canada, including Yellowknife.

"Yellowknife is probably the most Northern community with this type of technology on the planet, actually," Telus spokesperson Chris Gerritsen said.

Short for fourth-generation long-term evolution, the wireless network coverage offers peak download speeds of up to 75 megabytes per second.

"LTE offers incredible speeds," Gerritsen said, offering, for example, that a 600-megabyte CD that would take up to 30 minutes to download in a third-generation (3G) market, would take three-and-a-half to seven minutes to download on the newer technology.

"So it really enhances the experience for interactive applications such as multi-player gaming, rich multimedia communications, remote presentations, and video applications like Skype, Google Talk, and video streaming," he said.

Yellowknifers are not yet able to subscribe to Telus wireless accounts, so the network upgrade caters to southern Telus customers who work and do business regularly in the city.

However, the launch of the service in Yellowknife is part of a two-prong approach, Gerritsen said, that would soon see Telus providing Yellowknife residents with Telus phone numbers.

"Our second step is to bring full Telus service to Yellowknife in the coming months for local residents," Gerritsen said. "So in the coming months a Yellowknife resident who wishes to become a Telus customer exclusively will be able to do so with a local number, a local Telus number."

Last December, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission ended NorthwesTel's monopoly over telephone service in the North, clearing the way for competitors to provide 867 phone numbers.

Telus is offering the service through a network-sharing agreement with NorthwesTel parent company Bell, which became the first to offer 4G LTE in Yellowknife last December.

"It's kind of the latest, latest generation technology," Wade Oosterman, president of Bell Mobility and residential services, told Yellowknifer at the time. "It gives you more capacity and more speed. If you just watch a video, for example, you'll notice that there's absolutely no buffering, no stuttering - there's no delays."

For competitive reasons, Gerritsen declined to provide a firm timeline for when Telus plans to roll out cellphone service to Yellowknifers, or whether the company plans to open a storefront to sell its LTE-compatible devices.

Telus currently has about 7.3 million wireless subscribers across the country.

The company said it plans to continue expanding its 4G LTE coverage, with an aim to reach more than 25 million Canadians by the end of 2012.

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