Max Materi of Red Creek Telecom came before Council on March 6 to discuss a proposed high speed solution with council.
Red Creek is a Fort St. John based internet provider that is looking to mount a series of mesh network routers to a series of light posts to serve about 50 homes in the Valleyview area to test how the network would work in Tumbler Ridge.
“We noticed that Tumbler Ridge is a prime location for this,” says Materi. “Tumbler hasn’t had much infrastructure movement.”
He says the company has been doing wireless networking in the Fort St. John and Taylor area for the last three years, though this is a new technology, Cn-Wave mesh networking devices.
While the plan is to start with 150 Mb up and down, the speed of the network can easily be scaled up to 250, 500 and even gigabit speeds.
With the district’s assistance, says Materi, the entire community could be built out in a matter of weeks. This deployment, he says, would significantly enhance service to businesses and residents.
For the Valleyview test, he says they would need access to eight light poles, and 35 watts of power per unit.
According to BC Hydro, that would work out to about $35/year per unit.
“After we are done with this build, we would explore options to build out the entire town,” says Materi.
He says the company would be willing to provide wi-fi in public spaces for the district in exchange for the district covering the cost of power, though he says the company is not opposed to paying for its own power, too.
The company has already secured a circuit from Telus to run the test on.
Materi says the plan is to charge about $100/month to start, with speeds up to 150 mb up and down, but would look at increasing that as the network was built out. He says the company would need about 150 people to sign up to make the system viable.
One of the benefits of this style of network is it is self healing. If a node is damaged, the system can automatically route around the damaged node. While the people on that node would be without internet until it got fixed, the rest of the system would be stable.
If each node can service about six houses, and there are about 1093 residences in town, the company would need 183 nodes. At $34.65 per unit for power, that would be about $6400 per year in power to provide the entire town internet.
Red Creek is keen on working in Tumbler Ridge. Indeed, on their website, it already shows areas they currently cover.
This is the fifth proposal the district has looked at in the last four years.
In April of 2019, Council approved signing a contract with the Peace Region Internet Society (PRIS) to provide $800,000 in funding to wire the town for fibre optic, contingent on PRIS receiving $1.15 million in grants from Northern Development Initiative Trust and the Connecting British Columbia program.
While the grants came through, PRIS did not, and the partnership was placed on hold, due to a change in the company’s administrative leadership and inability to manage such a large project during their transition.
The district again went looking for help bridging the last mile, between the Telus switch—which has fibre—and resident’s doorstep—which connects via the phone line, using a process called DSL. While the process has allowed Telus to bring in “high-speed” Internet to Tumbler, much of the town taps out at 15 Mbps (Megabytes per second) up and 1 Mbps down, which fails the government’s target of “50 Mbps up/10 Mbps down” across most of rural Canada by 2026.
Next came Telus. For a big company like Telus, the small population of Tumbler Ridge makes installing fibre to the doorstep a poor business case. Too expensive for too few people. But, backed by a grant that meets the federal government’s target speeds of 50 Mbps up, 10 Mbps down, Telus was willing to do it.
The initial application, though, failed to meet the requirements, but Telus was invited to apply again for the next intake.
They didn’t.
Which left Tumbler Ridge in the same situation it was in before. The town is prepped for fibre, with underground conduit. There is fibre running to the community. But nobody is willing to make that last mile connection.
In November of 2020, a company called Canadian Fibre Optic (CFO) appeared (virtually) before council to discuss their hopes to bring fibre to the doorstep to Tumbler Ridge.
Shortly after CFO approached the district, Telus—with a new regional manager—approached the district to propose bringing fibre optic services to Tumbler. In order for them to do that, though, they asked for the District to fund $900,000 of the estimated $6-million it would cost for them to wire the district up with fibre, including a redundant backbone in case any beavers got hungry.
Council seemed interested, but both proposals have languished and no forward motion has been made—or at least, nothing that has been made public.
The District will consider Red Creek’s proposal over the next while.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.