Service being evaluated, but town seems too small
Ian Elliot
Northern News Services
INUVIK (May 22/98) - The phone company is currently evaluating Inuvik to determine if it should set up cellular telephone service here.
But there are a lot of hurdles to clear before people can even dream about checking in by phone from their bush camps, including the town's size, the cost of setting up a network and the rather stagnant local economy.
"By September at the latest, we should have determined whether any of these communities are able to support a cellular network," said Glenn Nicol, vice-president of NMI Mobility.
The rule of thumb is that a community has to have at least 4,000 people for a cellular phone network to be profitable, although there are exceptions -- Iqaluit fails the population test but will be getting cell phone service soon because it is going to be the hub of the new Nunavut government.
Every 4,000-strong community in NorthwesTel's area now has a cell phone network and the company is looking at so-called second-tier centres to determine if the service should be offered there. Inuvik is one of the centres being examined.
The cost of installing the network, which would cover the town and an area about 18 kilometres outside it, would be about $400,000 and Nicol said even if the company determines it couldn't make money doing it alone, it would be willing to come to Inuvik if a government or business group offered to share the cost.
"There's no denying it, we get lots of calls from lots of communities asking for a cellular network, but there are a lot of things we have to look at."
And while cell phones are still over the horizon, forget about tapping into the latest technologies, like PCS and Fido, that are currently taking the south by storm.
"The economics of PCS are even worse than the economics of cellular," said Nicol, noting that to recover the costs, you need a large population in a relatively small area.
"It is a much more costly exercise to install a network like that and you need a lot more people to use it. The total population of the NWT, Yukon and northern B.C. is about 110,000 people. There are more people in a bedroom community outside Edmonton than there are in our entire area."
