September 14 , 2001

Baker Lake flies solo on the Internet

Small-scale satellite firm offers low-cost connection

JIM BELL
Nunatsiaq News

IQALUIT — Tired of waiting for service from Nunavut’s established Internet access providers, the hamlet of Baker Lake has found its own way onto the Internet.

It’s a small-scale satellite-based data transmission system they’re leasing from a Winnipeg firm called First Nations Power Tech-nologies.

"It rocks," says Baker Lake’s hamlet foreman, Joe Aupaluktuq. "I think it will open the way for other communities to make easier access for everybody."

At the heart of Baker Lake’s new system is a small satellite dish that’s about six feet in diameter.

Through it, data from the Internet will flow into Baker Lake at a rate of 512 kilobytes per second, eight times faster than the service that the much-maligned Ardicom firm supplies to Baker Lake’s government offices.

In the other direction, the data flow right now is 32 Kbps, expandable to 64 Kbps, making the system ideal for most World Wide Web users, who typically download far more information than they upload.

Compared to the primitive degree of connectivity that Baker Lake residents struggled with until now, the new system is "super-fast," Aupaluktuq says.

"Last year it took forever to download a file, more than two hours. But now it can take 10 minutes or less," he says.

What’s more, the hamlet will offer a local dial-up service to private customers in Baker Lake. Aupaluktuq says rates will likely be $55 a month for residential customers and $150 a month for businesses.

Ordinary Baker Lake residents will likely welcome this development. Although the school and Nunavut government offices are now connected to the Internet through a service provided by Ardicom, private Internet users have been forced to make expensive long-distance modem calls to southern Internet service providers.

At the same time, no private firm has, until now, been willing to offer Internet services to non-government consumers in Baker Lake.

"We’ve been asking different Internet service providers over the past three or four years who said ‘we’re going to do it, we’re going to do it, we’re going to do it’ — but we got tired of waiting. We finally said forget it, we’ll do it ourselves."

Aupaluktuq said the hamlet will also use the service to provide Internet connection to a youth drop-in centre in Baker Lake.

Lucas Penner, First Nations Power Tech-nologies’s sales manager, says the hamlet of Baker Lake is the company’s first customer.

But he says his company hopes to attract similar customers throughout northern Canada, including Nunavut.

Penner said his First Nations Power Technologies leases relatively low-cost satellite time through an Ottawa-based firm called RamTel, which buys it in bulk from Telesat Canada.

Aupaluktuq says he expects other Nunavut municipalities will be interested in learning from Baker Lake’s experience, and that he’s already fielded calls from the municipality of Pangnirtung.

First Nations Power Technologies’ Web site is located at: www.fnptech.com.