Full speed ahead

Ken johnston

Last week Ken Boshcoff, Liberal Member of Parliament for Thunder Bay-Rainy River, announced that NAV Canada has given the final approval for construction of four broadband towers in the west Rainy River District.

While four towers are going up already, work had halted until the final approval to go above 100 feet with the towers was approved by NAV Canada. With so many of these towers going up, combined with the fact that it was summer and many NAV Canada employees were on vacation, there had been some delays in getting approval for them. However, that is all moot now.

Geoff Gillon of the Rainy River Future Development Corporation (RRFDC) told the Record, “This is good news. You folks out there will soon be up and running with this.”

Gillon explained that this is part two of the BRAND project that saw high speed internet services extended to Fort Frances, Emo, Nestor Falls and seven First Nations three years ago. The money invested in that was used to leverage $1.2 million in federal and provincial funding for this expansion of the service. Of that FedNor contributed $300,000 and the Northern Ontario Heritage Fund contributed $900,000.

A tower in Morson has already been completed with three others including one at Bergland and one near Pinewood and one at Deerlock currently under construction. Once they are up and running residents in and around those areas will be able to access wireless high speed internet. Thunder Bay Telephone is spearheading the project and has said in the past the current fee for wireless net access in Rainy River of nearly $70 will drop dramatically. At that time they said around $40-45 per month.

Ross Desjardins, Thunder Bay Tel Project Manager, said some towers will come on line sooner than others but they hope they will all be up and running by year’s end.

He also said that cell phone service has been added to the Morson tower and residents in that area will soon have cell service. Cell service may be expanded in the future now that the bulk of the infrastructure will in place.