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NORTHWEST TERRITORIES
Internet service is not bad in Tuktoyaktuk these days, Mayor Mervin Gruben says, but he is definitely intrigued by recent proposals to bring the North's service up to par with southern urban centres.

The latest proposal, from satellite services operator Telesat, would more than double the satellite bandwidth available for broadband in the North, the company stated, and even though Tuktoyaktuk is not one of the 10 NWT communities reliant on satellite, Gruben is listening.

"We're getting pretty good service out of here but faster Internet for sure would be good," Gruben said. "It's enough to get by but definitely not as fast as what I would get in Calgary or Edmonton."

Telesat's proposal promises that parity across the North, said Paul Bush, vice-president of business development, but would require a $120 million dollar buy-in from federal and territorial governments, in addition to a $40 million dollar investment in cash and kind from the company, to provide the proposed satellite bandwidth and ground segment upgrades over the next 10 years.

Telesat's Arctic Communications Infrastructure Initiative comes in response to the Arctic Communications Infrastructure Assessment Report published last year, which found "a growing gap between the level of service available in the North versus the South," a severe shortage of affordable bandwidth, and frequent network outages suffered by all territories.

Telesat's three prime satellites built and designed directly over Canada, called Anik F1R, F2, and F3, already have the capacity to carry sufficient broadcasting, voice, and Internet services to meet the requirements of Northern communications, Bush said.

If approved, Telesat could, within 12 months, more than double the capacity carried by its satellites, by adding an additional 15 transponders to the 10 transponders currently transmitting information.

In addition, while the current satellite dish ground stations across the North look at just one satellite, ground station upgrades would enable them to look at the Anik F3 satellite in addition to Anik F2, which would quadruple the Internet throughput capacity, and provide much-needed service redundancy, Bush said.

Arctic Fibre Inc. president Doug Cunningham--whose company recently proposed the creation of a 15,600 km, undersea fibre-optic cable system through the Northwest Passage, joining Northern Asia and Japan to the United States, Canada and Northern Europe - called the Telesat proposal "outmoded technology."

"If Industry Canada wants to spend that kind of money, for $120 million they could provide virtually unlimited fibre capacity to 89 per cent of Nunavut's residents," Cunningham said, acknowledging that Arctic Fibre's system would not reach the majority of satellite-dependent communities in the NWT.

"In our case, no we won't hit all of the people, but we will hit 89 per cent of the Nunavut population, and what the government and the carriers can do is utilize some of that satellite capacity we would displace, and redeploy it to the small communities we can't reach with fibre."

Gruben said he would prefer the fibre-optic line, which is planned to go through Tuktoyaktuk, because the technology is "faster and reliable."

"Until someone digs it up of course," he said.

Fibre is "nowhere near as reliable" looking at fibre cuts, because it takes significantly longer to repair than it did to get Anik F2 back online, Bush said, referring to the Oct. 6 satellite malfunction that isolated all the North's satellite-dependent communities.

If approved for funding, Telesat's proposal could be implemented within a year. Arctic Fibre aims to gather enough international and domestic buy-in for the $640 million capital cost of its network, to start the construction of the first link between Newfoundland and Iqaluit in the third quarter of 2013.

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