People looking for an alternative to Telus (too congested) or Starlink (too expensive) now have a third option.
Red Creek Telecom has launched its new Cn-Wave mesh service in Tumbler Ridge.
Plans start at $55/month for 55 Mbps symmetrical service (up and down) and no data cap.
At the top end, they are offering 250 Mbps up and down with no data cap for $110/month.
The service is available on the top and middle benches with plans to expand to the lower bench soon.
Red Creek is a Fort St. John based internet provider. They offer a “60ghz Point to multi point network,” according to their Facebook site, “with a dedicated fiber link back to our data centre in Fort St. John.” The company has leased a tower on the ridge outside of town to serve internet to the District.
Which sounds suspiciously like what PRIS was offering, back when they were in town.
Yes and no, says owner Max Materi. “We have a site up on the hill that we’re allowed to use, which we’ve acquired. We can reach all of Tumbler Ridge at a certain capacity level currently, but by the end of this month—by the end of June—we should be fully up and running.”
He says the company is still working on setting up a test with wireless internet mounted on light poles, but since the company has the ability to run from the tower, they have decided to move ahead with that, too. “We have our own fiber circuit from Fort St. John to our data center here in town, so we just decided we might as well start rolling out some of our service.”
Unlike PRIS, though, the company is relying on people who are signing up for the service to host the wireless repeaters in their house (for a discount, according to the website) and sharing the service with other people around.
These repeaters help build a so-called mesh network.
This, admits Materi, isn’t the preferred solution, but it allows them to offer the service in Tumbler Ridge, someplace that he says has been under-served by internet providers.
PRIS pulled out of Tumbler Ridge shortly after Telus arrived. In that time, says Materi, the technology has advanced considerably. “PRIS was using an old 900MB equipment, where you could only do like 5MB,” he says. “The stuff that we’re putting up? You can do gigabits down to each house.”
But not yet. He says once the system is up and running, they’ll ramp up the speeds, but for now, it tops out at 250 Mbps. (Starlink’s top speed is 200 Mbps.)
Materi says the company wanted to get service into the community sooner, rather than later for a far less technical reason than some might think. It’s easier to install in summer. “It’s a good time to build when it’s not -40,” he says.
People are already signing up for the service, and technicians are already in town installing the service, he says. “We’re already booked up to the end of the month. We’re trying to make it more affordable and obviously a little bit cheaper than the satellite solutions, and more speed obviously. And once we get working with the District, we can bring up higher speed plans because we can have those nodes closer together on the poles and everything. Right now we definitely can do 250 megs up, 250 megs down.” He pauses. “Probably more, but we’ll see how it goes.”
He says the problem right now with the service is there’s going to be pockets in town where there might not be service for a while. “If you’re at one end of the block and you want service, and someone at the other end of the block has service, but nobody else on the block wants service, there might be issues there.”
But nothing insurmountable, he says. That’s the beauty of the system, as it’s very fast to set up and expand, and very flexible. “Especially with doing what we’re doing right now, where we have a high point where we can bring services to pretty much anywhere in town. It just means a little bit more investment from us.”
Right now, the lower bench is not getting service like the rest of the town, but that, he says will change by the end of the month.
Materi says the company is doing what it can to be flexible. “The first month’s free on us, we’re doing the installs for free, and there are no contracts.” He believes the service will speak for itself.
He says the company only needs 150 or so people to make it viable in Tumbler. But, he says, the more people who sign up, the stronger the service will be.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
