Rankin Inlet (May 16/05) - The on-again-off-again saga of high speed Internet in the North has two new players.

Cordell Satellite Systems, a Thompson, Manitoba-based Internet provider, and NorthwesTel Cable both say they will be ready to provide two-way satellite residential access across the North in a month or two.

Both come via Telesat and its Anik F2 satellite. The Cordell service is called Xplornet, while the cable company has dubbed its service NetKaster.

Each requires a dish and related hardware that Bill Cordell, owner of the Manitoba company, expects to sell for about $500 along with a monthly subscription of $50-$60.

NorthwesTel has yet to release its pricing schedule.

"We're getting trained on it right now and once it's available we'll want to make some adjustments for life in the North," Cordell said.

"People in the south don't always know how to build things for the North."

Making modifications to protect equipment from the cold is nothing new to him.

The mercury can drop pretty low in Thompson, and besides, Cordell already has some clients North of 60.

Cordell built and maintains Calm Air's highspeed connection for its Rankin Inlet operation.

After about a year of trial and error, they discovered the addition of a small heater in the set-up kept the transmitter from freezing when temperatures dipped below -35C.

Nowadays Bryan Fotheringham, the airline's Nunavut area sales manager, said the system works great.

"It makes a huge world of difference," he said. "The downloads are super fast."

The $5,000 system Calm Air uses is a little more sophisticated than the planned residential version, Cordell said. He noted that downloads on the new version will still move at one megabyte/second (mbps).

Uploads, such as out-going e-mails, are slower at a minimum of 60-100 kilobytes/second (kbps), but Fotheringham said that's better than what's currently available in Nunavut.

"With dial-up it says 56 kbps for uploads, but if you log on and it's busy, that drops to about one or two kbps if you're lucky," he said.

NorthwesTel's system will have four levels of service, with downloads ranging from 512 kbps to two mbps and upload speeds of 128 kbps-500 kbps.

Available anywhere

The NetKaster system will eventually be available anywhere in the North, said project manager Christine Nguyen.

The first markets to get connected will be Rankin Inlet, Rae-Edzo and Yellowknife's Ingraham Trail area.

"It's an open market," she said.

"We saw an opportunity to improve the quality of life for people and we took it."