Northwestel teaming up with Telesat to bring high-speed internet to all 25 communities by 2029
Internet speeds across Nunavut will be raised to levels already in place across most of Canada within three years, says Buckley Belanger, the secretary of state for rural development.
Belanger announced a federal government plan to spend $86 million over three years to improve the territory’s telecommunications infrastructure, in Iqaluit on Thursday.
“All 25 communities will be receiving high-speed internet that’s 50-10,” Belanger said during the announcement at Nunavut Arctic College.
That means 11,650 Nunavut households, as well as businesses and institutional offices, will get access to unlimited internet data and speeds of at least 50 megabits per second for downloads, and 10 megabits per second for uploads by 2029.
Currently, Northwestel offers residential internet speeds of 15 megabits per second for downloads and two megabits per second for uploads. That’s for customers in Iqaluit, Rankin Inlet, Cambridge Bay and Arviat and comes with a 300 gigabyte monthly data limit.
Nunavut’s telecom project will be funded through the federal government’s $3.225-billion Universal Broadband Fund, designed to bring high-speed internet to the entire country including rural and remote areas by 2030.
Northwestel is partnering with Telesat — a former Crown corporation that now operates as a Canadian-controlled publicly traded company — to upgrade the infrastructure on the ground and in the sky, with federal support.
Preparation for infrastructure upgrades is already underway, with Northwestel planning to connect fibre cable that’s necessary for high-speed internet to all homes in every community. It will also add receiving stations at each of Northwestel’s community offices.
Northwestel plans to start work after the 2027 sealift, said Tammy April, vice-president of strategic growth, in an interview.
“We’ll have Telesat equipment on our central offices in each of the communities,” she said. “There will be a big dish or sometimes multiple dishes on the roof of our buildings.
“We’ll be running fibre optic cable to people’s homes. Our goal is to hit about half of the homes in Nunavut next year.”
She said the company will train and hire cable-splicers needed in every community in 2027. Later, Inuktitut call centre workers and service technicians will also be hired.
As for the cost of faster internet, April said she anticipates the price will be around $110 per month for households.
Meanwhile, Telesat is working with MDA Space Ltd., which it contracted to manufacture a constellation of 156 low-Earth orbit satellites at its factory in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, Que.
The first two test satellites are expected to launch within six months, said Andrew Lockhart, Telesat’s director of government relations and public affairs.
“With this new low-Earth orbit system, we’ll be able to provide much quicker, basically fibre-like speeds from space,” Lockhart said.
The satellites are about the size of a commercial freezer and weigh 800 kilograms.
By 2027, the company forecasts launching a few satellites every three weeks until they’re all in space and operational by early 2028.
