Fixed Wireless Business

RAMTelecom and Baker Lake

A remote Inuit community in northern Canada proves that high-speed solutions come in many shapes and sizes. Baker Lake residents combine the versatility of Wi-Fi with the ubiquity of a satellite system to provide access for its truly remote location.

by Gerry Blackwell [October 1, 2002]

When high-speed Internet service came to remote Baker Lake, a tiny Inuit community in Canada's north, people literally danced for joy. It's little wonder.

Before Ottawa-based R.A. Misener Telecom Corp. (RAMTelecom) sold a satellite Internet connection and turnkey ISP set-up to Baker Lake, residents had to pay long distance telephone charges to connect to the Net and could count on connecting at 4,800 bits per second.

"You'd be waiting five to ten minutes for a page to open," remembers Joe Aupaluktuq, operations manager for the hamlet of Baker Lake and manager of the year-old, not-for-profit community Internet service.

One small arts and crafts business in town was paying up to $600 a month to stay connected. "We charged him a flat rate of $90 a month," says Aupaluktuq. "He's going to be saving a fair bit now."

It didn't take long after the service went live in August 2001, however, for Baker Lake-ites to get used to the higher-speed 33-Kbps dial-up service—and then quickly grow frustrated by how slow and cumbersome it still was.

It was also always the same six or so of the 40 charter subscribers who were hogging the modem lines, Aupaluktuq says. Others subscribers complained, naturally, but the cost of adding new modem lines was high.

So Aupaluktuq did a little research and discovered the wonders of high-speed fixed wireless technology. He went back to RAMTelecom, which earlier this summer installed a 900 MHz WaveRider LMS non-line-of-sight wireless access system in Baker Lake.

Now up to 60 subscribers can be online simultaneously. The subscriber base has already swelled to about 60, with more on a waiting list, as news of the much-improved service spread. The Internet is always on, and each subscriber can count on getting about 80 Kbps—a huge improvement over 33.6, Aupaluktuq says.

It's the same benefits, the same evolutionary process as people all over North America have gone through in moving from slow to faster dial-up, then to high-speed Internet service. It's just that the pace of evolution was a little quicker in Baker Lake.

Emergent evolution
The story starts with RAMTelecom. Owner and president Ralph Misener spent ten years in Inuvik in the Yukon with the Canadian military and another three at an armed forces base at Alert near the North Pole. He knew the north, and he knew satellite technology, which is widely used there.

In 1999, Misener launched RAMTelecom to sell mobile satellite services to the military. Two years ago, he realized that demand was growing in northern communities for better Internet service and he saw that satellite was a way to satisfy it.

In partnership with Telesat, the Canadian satellite company that launched the first commercial geostationary satellite over 30 years ago, Misener developed his Independence service offering. By April of 2001, he had network infrastructure in place—mainly a hub co-located at Telesat's main teleport site in Toronto.

His customers are typically aboriginal band councils and municipal corporations in very small communities like Baker Lake. They buy a package of products and services from RAMTelecom, including the satellite link and turnkey ISP system, and then resell bandwidth to local residents and businesses either on a for-profit or cost-recovery basis.

Customers pay $22,400 to $25,600 for hardware and installation for the Independence satellite link. The pricing varies according to the equipment needed. The further away from RAMTelecom's hub, the bigger—and more expensive—the satellite dish required.

The communities then pay from $1,920 to $2,560 a month for bandwidth. The downlink is always 512 Kbps. The uplink is in increments of 64 Kbps.

If this sounds meager for a Tier 1 connection for providing "high-speed" service, Misener is quick to point out that, without routers and switches, overheads in a satellite network are much lower than in terrestrial networks. Also, Telesat uses very efficient bandwidth sharing technology.

"It's very clean bandwidth," Misener says. "With an uplink of 128 Kbps and downlink of 512 Kbps, you get throughput that is almost the same as a terrestrial T-1 connection."

Community service
Misener's first customer was tiny Obedijwan, a small native community in northern Quebec, which already had a 10-Mbps fiber backbone linking its school, health center and band council office. Obedijwan provided high-speed service to the fiber-linked sites and dial-up to local residents and businesses.

Baker Lake was the second customer to come online. It's a rare inland Inuit community, 320 kilometers from the west coast of Hudson Bay on the shores of the lake after which it's named.

Baker Lake claims to be at the geographic center of Canada, though most Canadians think of it—if they've heard of it at all—as being in the far, far north. The community is in the territory of Nunavut (meaning the land), which was split off from the Northwest Territories three years ago as an Inuit homeland.

The current community of Baker Lake was created by the federal government in the 1960s when famine was decimating the populations of the nine separate Inuit tribal groups in the region. They live together today in Baker Lake. A few of the older residents were among the last Inuit to be born in igloos.

It may seem surprising that such a remote community, with its harsh climate, barren landscape and hard-scrabble economy—which is still dependent to some extent on hunting and fishing—would even know about, much less care greatly about the Internet. Not so.

"They want to move into the 21st century," says Misener. "They all have TV. They've heard about the technology. They want to make good use of it."

The several tourism and arts-related businesses in the community want to keep in closer touch with the south—where their customers are. Southern business interests in the area—mining in Baker Lake, for example—want to establish their remote operations as virtual offices attached to the corporate local area network (LAN) down south.

Community leaders see it as a way of keeping locals from heading south, as so many in northern native communities do. It's a vital link for education. Students use it to research homework assignments. Teachers use it to download lesson plans.

"Satellite and wireless technology opens up a lot of information to our young people," Aupaluktuq says.

He hopes the technology can be used soon to offer older students distance learning courses. He is in the process of setting up a system in the youth drop-in center so they can enjoy the same recreational activities on the Net as southerners.

Aupaluktuq sums it up simply. "We have to communicate with other people in the world," he says.

ISP ancilla
RAMTelecom now has eight northern communities. Only some are aboriginal settlements. About half are running their ISP services as for profit ventures; the others are only aiming to recover costs.

Misener had initially conceived of the business as simply selling satellite links, but soon found that his customers also needed help setting up as ISPs.

So today RAMTelecom sells and installs complete ISP systems, including RADIUS servers, modem banks, wireless point-to-point links where needed and, now, wireless point-to-multipoint networks based on the WaveRider technology. Baker Lake was the first of those.

The WaveRider technology was the best for the circumstances, Misener says. "The non-line-of-sight capability helps tremendously. The technology has proven itself out. We also spoke to other WaveRider customers before we bought, and the others are all extremely happy."

RAMTelecom, meanwhile, has introduced a new product, HSi (high-speed Internet), a 500-Kbps (downlink) service it's reselling for Telesat.

HSi is mainly designed for small offices in regions where other high-speed services are not available. This mostly, again, means remote northern locations. But RAMTelecom has one customer in Ottawa, the nation's capital, and some just outside.

The service costs about $1,900 for hardware and installation and $175 a month. That still represents a premium price, but Misener claims that within two years Telesat will be able to offer a residential service priced below today's DSL and cable services.

Satellite, as we've noted before, is starting to look more interesting as a technology for providing high-speed Internet services. And not just in remote places like Baker Lake.

—End