Communities going online with help from broadband fund

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This article was published 14/05/2022 (1589 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Another cluster of rural communities in Manitoba will have access to high speed internet thanks to the federal government’s Universal Broadband Fund.

The Rural Municipality of St. Laurent on the western shore of Lake Manitoba has been awarded just more than $1 million from the UBF.

The service will be provided by Starlink, a globally available satellite-based service operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company.

The funding will go towards covering the approximately $800 cost for the hardware required to launch the service for each residence.

Upload and download speeds are fast enough to satisfy Canada’s connectivity strategy which aims to provide 98 per cent of Canadians with access to Internet speeds of at least 50 megabits per second (Mbps) download/10 Mbps upload by 2026 and 100 per cent by 2030.

Cheryl Smith, Reeve of the RM of St. Laurent said that because of the fact that the residents in her community are so spread out , many are not able to subscribe to land-based services, although she said some close to Highway 6 report adequate service from BellMTS, for instance.

“But many in our rural municipality high speed Internet service is poor-to-non-existent, “ Smith said.

Many UBF fundings go towards covering some of the costs of laying cable and building so-called fibre-to-the-home.

But in the case of the St. Laurent project – which also includes the lake front communities of Twin Lakes Beach, Laurentia Beach and Oak Point – the money will go towards covering the cost of the hardware needed to access the low earth orbit satellite service.

“Not having access to reliable internet has made the impact of the pandemic even more difficult that other areas of the country,” said Terry Duguid Liberal MP for Winnipeg South and Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Environment and Climate Change.

Because there is no construction set up, this funding comes from the UBF’s rapid response stream. Smith said she hopes people will be able to start order their equipment very soon.

The funding is expected to be able to cover the costs of 1,162 households.

Residents can chose to take part and then they will be responsible to pay the monthly fees of about $140 per month.

The $2.75 billion UBF has already funded 22 projects in Manitoba to the tune of $249 million impacting about 95,000 homes. According to the most recent data, only Ontario and Quebec have benefited more than Manitoba from UBF project funding.

Smith said Starlink service gets pretty good reviews from other users in Manitoba except for some service disruption during storms, the downside of any satellite service.

“To us this was an alternative that made sense,” said Smith. “Our community is very spread out and it’s pretty much entirely single family dwellings. The traditional fibre optics networks that run close to major highways or Hydro lines just does not work for our community.”

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca