Fixed Wireless Business

Crossing The Digital Divide

When a small community in rural Canada decided to become call center-ready, nobody could have imagined the myriad changes that broadband wireless would bring to Saint Pierre-Jolys.

by Gerry Blackwell [January 28, 2003]

Two years ago, the tiny community of Saint Pierre-Jolys in the central Canadian province of Manitoba thought it had found the solution to its economic woes. It would establish itself as a "call center-ready community"—one capable of building and staffing a call center on demand—and thus qualify for provincial subsidies.

But call centers today don't just offer phone-based services. They also have to be able to provide chat and e-mail contact for customers of e-commerce companies, and even video conferencing. To do that, they need high-speed Internet access. And that's where Saint Pierre ran into the great Digital Divide.

The town is 30 miles south of the provincial capital, Winnipeg, near Canada's border with Minnesota. Like most small communities in southern Manitoba, and many across the continent, it didn't have broadband access: no cable, no DSL and no leased line services—or not without prohibitive costs for fiber construction from incumbent telco MTS Communications Inc. of Winnipeg.

It took over a year, but the determined folk of Saint Pierre, led by the inter-community Rat River Communications Co-op, found a way to bridge the Divide using broadband fixed wireless technology. Today the town and its partners operate their own wireless ISP, using a Motorola Canopy fixed wireless access system to provide high-speed service to local businesses and residents.

The project started from a simple enough premise, says Murielle Bugera, a local economic development officer and prime mover in the project. "Businesses and residents in Winnipeg have high-speed Internet," Bugera says. "So it's our right to have the same. But I don't think a lot of people realize how big a feat this was."

It was very much a community-based achievement, but with some interesting outside participants, including Manitoba Hydro, a "utelco" (telecom provider spun off from a power utility) and Calgary, Alberta-based Wicomm Inc., a unique middle-mile wireless carrier. It's a model that may be instructional to other small towns.

Saint-Pierre-Jolys and nearby St. Malo are both bilingual communities, partly settled by descendants of the courieurs de bois, the early French-Canadian fur traders. Last year, under the aegis of the Economic Development Council for Bilingual Municipalities (CDEM), a Manitoba community self-help facilitator, they formed an economic co-operative to pursue the call center idea.

The first step was hiring a consultant to do a feasibility study. The study pointed out the Digital Divide problem, but also mentioned Manitoba Hydro as a possible solution provider, along with Hydro's new partner Wicomm Inc. of Calgary. It was a few months before the co-op finally connected with Hydro and Wicomm, but after that, things moved fairly quickly.

Hydro, a utility run by the government of Manitoba Province, built its own fiber data communications network to meet internal requirements for monitoring, control, and security on its far flung power grid. It has operated the network for over 15 years, and began selling dark fiber as a carrier's carrier in the mid-1990s.

Because its capital investment in the network was covered by internal budgets, and because the cost of adding capacity to an existing fiber network is minimal, Hydro could afford to add gigabits of additional capacity—which it has done—and sell the additional capacity at rates well below other carriers.

Go to page two: Putting the pieces together >