Going digital: Info highway comes North

DWANE WILKIN

Work begins this summer connecting 58 communities in the Northwest Territories to a high-speed, two-way digital communciations network.

The multi-million dollar, five-year contract between the GNWT and Ardicom Digital Communications Ltd. was announced April 25 in Yellowknife, following many months of negotiation. The territorial government has become, in effect, Ardicom’s first tenant.

“Now, there’s a lot of space left on the pipeline, which Ardicom hopes to sell to other customers,” David Connelly, president of the northern-based consortium said.

The deal opens the way for communities and northern businesses to develop their own local applications for advanced electronic communications. The network will support such information services as video-conferencing, tele-medicine, distance education and the internet.

Savings for GNWT

And it is expected to save the GNWT upwards of $300,000 a year in phone bills, the amount the territorial government estimates it pays NorthwesTel to connect government offices with dedicated modem lines.

Gordon Robinson, deputy secretary of the Audit, Budget and Evaluation branch of the Financial Management Board, said the contract with Ardicom is worth almost certainly more than $3 million a year, though no figure has been fixed.

“We’re not quite sure at this point exactly how much we’re going to use it and in exctly what ways,” said Robinson. “As it’s used more and in additional places we would be adding capacity, and that would obviously raise the price.”

Ardicom, formed by Arctic Cooperatives Ltd., Northern Aboriginal Services Company (NASCO) and NorthwesTel, submitted its proposal to the GNWT last July. NASCO shareholders include the Inuvialuit Development Corporation and Nunasi Corporation as well as the Denedeh Development Corporation and the Yukon Indian Development Corporation.

Superior bid

Ardicom beat out two other proposals to bring the information highway to the North, including one prepared by a consortium under the name of Drum Communications, led by Television Northern Canada (TVNC) and Cancom.

Each NWT community is to have at least three points of access ­ the health centre or hospital, a local school and a government office. But Ardicom’s role ends where its digital communications system enters each community.

“The service we are providing is the pipeline in which the message is transmitted. We had to agree not to provide what hangs on the end of the pipe,” Connelly said.

The Ardicom plan relies on the use of NorthwesTel’s existing technical infrastructure to transmit and recieve signals to and from the communities.

It will be up to individual communities to decide how to further disperse the signal.

“There are a range of technologies, which vary from community to community, for the community-access system,” Connelly said.

One local delivery system would be by coaxial cable, another is existing telephone wire; a third possible system is “digital radio,” in which no wires are used at all.

Growth opportunities

Although the digital communciations network will compete directly with NorthwesTel’s conventional phone network, it shouldn’t threaten existing internet providers.

“Ardicom’s objective is to provide a service at a price that will attract the internet service providers to us,” Connelly said.

The potential exists for many other services to grow out of the upgraded network, as well.

Connelly said it will be possible, within the few months, for Canada Post to offer customers instant counter-to-counter mail delivery between NWT communities.

“It would reduce your cost and your time significantly, and therefore improve the service,” he said.

Other uses

And there are any number of applications for video-conferencing by community residents.

“This would allow someone from Broughton Island to show their art on display in Vancouver,” Connelly said. “Or, let’s say you wanted to have a gymnastics competition but couldn’t afford to pull all the kids together, you could hook up 12 communities and the judges­who wouldn’t even have to be in those communities­and you could have the gymnastic competiton.”

The first 16 communities are to be connected to the network by the end of the year, with the remainder scheduled for connection in 1998. Those communities in which GNWT offices are already connected via the government’s mainframe computer system, are a priority.

Ardicom has also committed to connecting as soon as possible those communities identified by the Nunavut Implementation Commission as probable locations for government offices after division in 1999.