High speed net service slowed by delays

Ken Johnston
Editor

Delays and more delays have been the norm the past few months for the partners in the Rainy River District Broadband project.
Steve Danielson of the Rainy River District School Board (RRDSB) said that the new estimated time of arrival at all district public schools for high speed internet is the end of April.
RRDSB partnered with Thunder Bay Telephone (TBT) late last year to install a microwave transmission system on area cell towers owned by the communications company. Prior to the partnership TBT was looking at doing a broadband project on its own and so was RRDSB. By pooling their resources they were able to put three times the bandwidth up on the towers than originally planned by TBT. Of the 150 megabytes of bandwidth, the schools will have exclusive use of 50 mb. The balance will be available for private companies to develop and distribute to homeowners.
Danielson said that the expanded bandwidth will mean baud (modem speed) rates of 56,000 bytes will seem extremely slow. Crossroads School in Devlin is already on line with the new system and it is experiencing baud rates in the 5 mb. range.
The goal for RRDSB is to have all its schools utilizing the high speed internet in order to provide students with the best possible advantages in learning off the internet. Due to delays, the early this year target to fire up the system has been rescheduled several times. Danielson said that Crossroads and Atikokan schools are already up and running. He hopes that Fort Frances schools will log onto the new system later this week and the rest of the schools will be on line by the end of the month.
The only exception to the system wide turn on will be McCrosson-Tovell in Bergland where there currently is no cell phone service and hence no tower to install the equipment on for broadband. Danielson said that the board is exploring other possibilities to get the school high speed service. One possibility is the use of satellite technology and the other is that the first nations there will partner with TBT to put an information tower up.
Timo Hiback of TBT said that the biggest delay that they have faced was the changing of suppliers of the technology they have been installing on the towers. “We switched suppliers for the majority of the microwave equipment as the first supplier discontinued the product. That left us in a state of flux and we had to reexamine the entire project to be sure we were getting the right technology,” said Hiback. Now back on track, Hiback is optimistic that the project will be fully operational in the next two to three weeks.
Technicians climbed Rainy River’s cell tower last Monday and installed microwave dishes on it. A new tower in Barwick that is essential to the system, was fired up last week and workers were busy tweaking it last Thursday.
Hiback said that once the technology is in place and fully operational, there will be plenty of opportunities for businesses to distribute high speed net service to communities all along the back bone, which will stretch from Rainy River to Thunder Bay. He also noted that the equipment could be used to provide digital cell phone service, but cautioned that digital cell service would have to prove its business viability on its own.
TBT has been in discussion with Internet Service Providers about the distribution of high speed services in communities across the area. However Hiback would not reveal any of the details or who they have been talking with.