ATHABASCA – High-speed internet infrastructure is making its way to Athabasca thanks to a series of government grants to help connect rural Canadians to an increasingly essential service.
Tracy Chalifoux presented Athabasca’s councillors with an April 15 update on the project on behalf of Xplore Inc. (formally Xplorenet), which is expected to finish a project to run fibre internet lines to town by March 2027, including where the lines will run, what it will do for the town, and most importantly, who’s paying for the work.
“We’re taking advantage of programs that provide funding to bring internet to rural parts of Canada,” said Chalifoux.
“Markets below 5,000 typically don’t get attention from Telus, Rogers, Bell or Shaw. We focus on that, that’s been our bread and butter for many years now.”
Chalifoux said the only way mid-sized telecom companies can make a profit was through government funding to cover the markets they do. Grant programs like the Alberta Broadband Fund and the federal Universal Broadband Fund, which is funding the Athabasca project — provide money for companies bringing high-speed internet into rural locations.
“Often we’ll get to a community like Athabasca and we find out once we’re there that there’s neighbourhoods that aren’t part of the build, so we’ll start building a business case study and go after those areas that are very close to the network we’re building.”
It’s unclear what parts of Athabasca the project will cover, although town CAO Rachel Ramey was able to confirm the project would extend west towards the summer villages.
Chalifoux said the project had already started to hire contractors and the design permits were expected to be in front of the town within the next month.
“The (federal government) had been talking about this years ago and it came about as the result of a big ice storm in Ontario and Quebec which caused everything to go down,” said Chalifoux.
“It really highlighted the areas that were not robust enough handle a large number of customers so a lot of people in rural areas with satellite networks found it was too unreliable.”
Once the physical infrastructure is built, Chalifoux said the company’s sales staff will start approaching home owners about tying their property into the grid. Xplore expects existing customers will be given the option to move over to the grid as well, since their homes would have been flagged by the company already.
Many of Athabasca’s key services, including the town office, library, and Athabasca University, utilize the SuperNet, which connects schools, municipalities, the justice system and health care facilities together. With institutions like AU continuing to grow however, the SuperNet doesn’t have the capacity to grow with them.
“We’ll be running extra fibres through the town knowing we’ve got areas that are not part of the overall funding package from the program. Talking with the build team, they’ll leave extra spools near subdivisions that aren’t captured by the project, and since the university isn’t captured, we’ll definitely leave some extra fibres in the area for that.”
