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 Paul Flaherty, president of NorthwesTel, was in town last week to attend a company awards banquet, but also stopped by town hall to present Inuvik's Mayor Peter Clarkson with a cheque for $17,000 towards the construction of the tot's area at the new family centre. The two also discussed a new digital service upgrade for Inuvik. - NNSL photo |
NorthwesTel President Paul Flaherty was in discussion with Inuvik leaders last week, concerning upgrading voice and data transmission to and from Inuvik.
Last year, the company introduced high-speed Internet access, but since the data is transferred via satellite, there have been some problems.
"We have some issues with our high-speed Internet here," Flaherty said.
The company is the first to introduce a ADSL high speed Internet service over a satellite and Flaherty admits there "have been some challenges to it."
"Initially, it worked very, very well," he said. "But more people took it than we had initially expected, so the growth just took off."
"We had to retrench a little bit to figure out how to expand it."
They re-jigged some things and had the service up to par, but have still had some glitches.
The Internet and telephone service will be greatly improved in Inuvik this summer, thanks to a new signal coming from the Yukon.
"We're going to build a $10 million digital radio from Dawson City all the way to Inuvik," Flaherty said. "It will dramatically improve service to Inuvik in a number of ways."
The quality of voice transmission will improve and also data transmission speed will be increased.
The telephone data for Inuvik currently travels up the Mackenzie Valley. About six months ago, NorthwesTel upgraded the link between Fort Simpson and Norman Wells to digital radio, but the stretch from the Wells to Inuvik is still transmitted over an old analog system. Flaherty said the upgrade should have improved the sound quality.
"People should have noticed an improvement in the quality of the long distance service, but it's not at its ultimate yet," he said.
The new equipment from Dawson City will be the equivalent of a fibre optic line that he says will greatly improve data and voice transmission.
"The capacity of this radio will be more than Inuvik will ever need," Flaherty said.
Inuvik currently uses about 24 megabits of service and the new transmitter will initially boost that to 155 megabits, with expansion to 1,000 megabits.
"We're not using that much capacity for all of Northern Canada," he said.
The radio transmitter will have a redundant path antenna, in case one malfunctions.
"If one channel goes down, the other starts up, but with fibre optic cable, if someone cuts it, you're out of service," he said.
During construction and maintenance of a Mackenzie Valley pipeline, data and voice lines will be required and Flaherty hopes to loop the digital radio along the valley, but are looking to differ the $10 to $15 million cost with the pipeline owners.
"If there's an interest in using digital radio, we will upgrade the Norman Wells to Inuvik part of the valley," he said. "The beauty of that, is, we'll have a complete ring all the way around."
Monitoring the pipeline will require data links either through a satellite uplink or fibre optics, so Flaherty said the radio might be a more affordable option for the pipeline owners.
