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IQALUIT
David Fulgham has a pie-in-the-sky idea to spread high-speed Internet across Nunavut, and reduce the territory's reliance on a single satellite.

That pie in the sky, in the non-profit Advanced Technology Group Society president's view, would be a series of floating communications transmitters above Nunavut hamlets.

"This spring we're looking at doing a feasibility study by launching a weather balloon with communications technology on it to perform a few tests to communicate between Kimmirut and Iqaluit, and possibly Pangnirtung," Fulgham said. "In theory it will work. In practice, we have to see."

Currently, Nunavut residents and businesses are dependent on a single communications satellite, Telesat's Anik F2, which is in orbit 35,786 km above the equator. The vulnerability of relying on one satellite was evident when it malfunctioned Oct. 6 and temporarily disabled communications between communities in the North and the rest of the world.

That outage sparked the need to find a solution. Fulgham envisions a series of floating nodes - dirigibles - 35 km above Nunavut that would create a high-altitude network between communities, where antennae would be placed to receive and transmit data through a community-based network.

The dirigibles would be out of range of airplanes, and on the edge of the stratosphere, so they would be unaffected by solar flare, he said. Solar powered blimps would also be 1,000 times closer than a satellite, latency - or transmission delay - would be 1,000 times less. Simply read, faster communications.

"Broadband connections should be high-speed bandwidth with low latency - the time it takes to get there and back - in both directions," Fulgham said.

"When you request something, it will come back 1,000 times quicker," with the proposed system, because of the reduced distance to the repeater.

The concept is an extension of the existing MeshNet, a series of repeaters in Iqaluit that creates a community intranet - or internal network between residents and businesses - and supplements the Internet that connects Iqaluit to the outside world. Allowing for download speeds of up to 10 megabits per second, it is used for peer-to-peer file sharing, video games networking, security camera data transmission, and video playback from IsumaTV media players located in the capital, among other things.

"The network providers have already established a fair amount of bandwidth coming into Nunavut," he said, so latency is the focus of MeshNet and HiAC.

In Pangnirtung, which, with Kimmirut, would be one of the test communities linking with Iqaluit, planning and lands administrator Daniel Kuluguqtuq is excited about the idea. He maintains the hamlet's website and says he gets Internet download speeds of about 80 to 90 kilobits per second at home. Iqaluit's download speeds are about 384 kbps, Fulgham said.

"It's a great idea," Kuluguqtuq said. "Our current capacity is minimal, and if we can up the speed between communities, it would save a lot of download waiting time."

If the Internet were bounced from Kuujjuaq, where there is a fibre-optic cable to the south, he said, "it could increase video sharing capacity. If you can eliminate the waiting time, it would be beneficial to everyone, not just businesses."

It's the first time such technology has been used for civilian use, Fulgham believes, but ATG drew on similar ideas in use by the United States military.

"Others have done similar things with surveillance and communications arrays over battlefields. We're taking all of that and incorporating it into our final vision of what we see. There's a potential of having an array of these type of devices and relaying to where you're trying to get. It's kind of like making a mesh network in the air."

For now, the dirigible system is still a dream. Fulgham isn't sure how much the test or the idea would cost, but if the spring test launch works, ATG will look for investors and funding.

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