Nunavik beats Nunavut to wireless broadband Internet

Christmas came early this year in Nunavik, with the launch of the region’s first high-speed Internet access service, after nearly 10 years of failed attempts and many heated debates over who should provide Internet to the region and how.
The Kativik Regional Government’s Tamaani wireless network was officially launched earlier this month at the KRG council meeting in Kuujjuaq.

“Everything’s installed and working very well,” said Joe Lance, director of the KRG’s administration and information technology department. “We’re so proud of it.”

Getting the network up and running took more than three years, lots of seed money from the federal and provincial governments and the Sanarrutik Agreement as well as a chunk of free broadband access from Ottawa’s National Satellite Initiative.

The KRG received $1.8 million each from the two governments and $1 million from the Sanarrutik Agreement. This was enough to get the system going inside KRG offices throughout Nunavik in 2003, using commercially purchased bandwidth, whose cost, Lance said, was “out of this world.”

Then, last April, the KRG was one of four organizations across Canada selected to receive free broadband access, or high-capacity Internet, through federal government’s National Satellite Initiative.

The NSI is intended to lower the cost of broadband for communities in remote areas of Canada, such as Nunavik or Nunavut, where satellite is the only means of offering broadband access.

Nunavik beat out Nunavut by more than a year in its application to the NSI program and, as a result, was accepted during the first round of applications. The next group of applications approved by the NSI won’t receive free broadband access, but rather a 75 per cent subsidy equal to the cost of buying the commercial bandwidth needed to operate the system.

“We were lucky to be ready for the first NSI application. We had to be fully operational to get a grant. We were operational and that’s why we received our request,” Lance said.

The program gave the KRG satellite capacity worth $7.86 million.

But the KRG had other obstacles to overcome: no business or group wanted to become the region’s commercial Internet Service Provider. Two years of negotiations with the Fédération des coopératives du Nouveau-Québec, which had already launched its own cable-based Ilagi Internet service in Inukjuak, Puvirnituq and Salluit in 2002, failed to produce any agreement.

The KRG finally decided to assume the responsibility and the financial risk and proceed.

“Johnny Adams [KRG chairman] and the executive decided to go ahead,” Lance said.

The KRG invested in modems capable of offering a wireless connection anywhere, even outside the line of sight.

“We said, we’re running a Cadillac — we have state-of-the-art technology everywhere throughout the network. All the pieces of the puzzle are state-of-the-art, so we cannot have unreliable equipment for the distribution,” Lance said.

The modems operate under a commercial licence held and operated by Inukshuk, a subsidiary of Microcell. Each subscriber to Tamaani receives a wireless modem, which will work in every Nunavik community.

“The signal doesn’t go through hills, but it can bounce off hills. You can take your computer anywhere in the community and to another community anywhere in Nunavik. No problem at all,” Lance said.

The KRG also hired four new employees —including Alec Clunas, Aulla Qaunaalluq and Sammy Pootoo Gordon, all young, trilingual Inuit — to oversee the Tamaani network offices in Kuujjuaq. The network involves a total of six full-time staff and two part-time local agents in every community, who were trained by Employment and Training programs to hook up new users and collect payment.

“Eventually, this could become a small business [for the agents]. In each community there’s a need for computer assistance,” Lance said.

Tamaani doesn’t expect to break even for the first two years. Its user packages range from a basic package at $59.95 a month for 500MB of traffic at 128Kb/s and one e-mail address to $99.95/month for “power users” who will receive 1GB of traffic at 256 Kb/s and three e-mail addresses.

Tamaani’s goal for the end of 2005 is to have about 600 subscribers.

For more information on the system, visit www.tamaani.ca or call 1-888-TAMAANI.