Nearly 2,700 homes across northern Saskatchewan will be getting faster Internet speeds by the end of the year.
SaskTel says it will be upgrading high-speed Internet in 26 northern communities.
Three of the communities — Missinipe, Brabant Lake and Wadin Bay — currently don’t have high-speed Internet.
SaskTel spokesperson Michelle Englot says the high construction cost prevented this from happening sooner.
“Yeah, I know,” she says. “And it is just a matter of how expensive it was, if you look at the cost of what the federal government did contribute to enabling this.”
Englot says it’s happening now because Ottawa is covering 75 per cent of the $9.9-million project through funding announced last year.
“So there was a significant shortfall if you were looking at it from a business perspective previously,” she says. “And we did have to add 89 km of fibre from Cigar Lake to Collins Bay and 9 km of fibre from Dillon to St. George’s Hill to provide the backhaul capacity to enable the faster Internet.”
When completed, residents in the affected communities will have download speeds of up to 5 Mbps — and upload speeds of up to 1 Mbps.
A list of the 26 northern Saskatchewan communities that will be getting faster Internet by the end of 2016:
- Bear Creek
- Black Lake
- Brabant Lake
- Canoe Narrows
- Clearwater River Dene Nation
- Dillon
- Dore Lake
- Far IR
- Fond du Lac
- Grandmother’s Bay
- Jans Bay
- Missinipe
- Patuanak
- Red Earth
- Shoal Lake
- Sled Lake
- Southend
- St. George’s Hill
- Stanley Mission
- Stony Rapids
- Sucker River
- Turnor Lake
- Wadin Bay
- Wahpeton
- Waterhen Lake
- Wollaston Lake