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| Just a click away: Affordable high-speed Internet comes to the countryside (Fall 2008) |
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By Lorne McClinton
Broadband Internet access has finally come to the countryside. Home-owners in almost every city and large town in Canada and the United States have had access to high-speed connections for 10 years. Until recently, though, anyone choosing to live beyond the city limits sign had to contend with dial-up access. Today, affordable microwave or satellite systems have made high-speed Internet connections possible almost everywhere.
It seems hard to believe, but only 15 years
ago, the only people using the Internet were
a few researchers at universities. It’s become
such an integral part of everyday life today
it is hard to imagine being without it. E-mail
has revolutionized business and personal
communications. Homework assignments, banking, shopping, and booking holidays are now commonly done online at home. Teenagers spend hours chatting with friends online.
While it was possible to do all these things
using a dial-up connection, it took so long
that the process was almost painful. With Web
sites starting to use more and more graphics
and with friends and relatives transmitting
ever larger photo files and videos, high-speed
Internet has become a necessity.
"We’re finding with the rising cost of fuel that more and more people are working from home," says Quinton Eon, sales and marketing manager with YourLink, a Saskatoon, Saskatchewan-based company specializing in rural Internet services. "If they’re set up with a high-speed connection, it’s possible for them to work from home using a remote desktop or virtual private network (VPN)."
Getting up to speed. Gary Gaudet and his family have been living on acreages outside of Saskatoon, in rural Saskatchewan, since the mid-1990s. He switched to a high-speed wireless microwave-based Internet connection as soon as one became available in the area.
"In this day and age I don’t know if you can
operate without high-speed Internet," Gaudet
says. "Our kids seem to live on MSN, and my
wife and I use it for e-mail, online banking,
and airline travel. I own the Green Brier Golf and Country Club in Saskatoon, so we also
use the Internet to purchase supplies. Also,
I can use it to access the club’s 16 security
cameras right from my house, 24 hours a day."
Once a company puts up a tower in your area, getting high-speed installed is relatively straight-forward. As long as your home has a clear line of sight to the tower, all that is necessary is to install an antenna on your roof. If you don't, though, it's more difficult.
Location limitation. "Location is your primary limitation," Eon says. "Trees and rolling hills play a big factor with getting services. If you’re surrounded by large trees or heavy brush then we have to use a tower or install some type of mast on top of the house to
get over those trees to get line-of-sight."
"Even though we are surrounded by trees,
getting high-speed was relatively straightforward," Gaudet says. "They installed an
antenna on our roof, cut down one tree, and
trimmed another. The system works 100%."
Other subscribers haven’t been as fortunate.
Eon says sometimes hooking up a high-speed
connection requires a lot of creativity.
"We’ve installed services on barns and
then re-broadcast the signal over to the
house," Eon says. "Sometimes, if the customer
lives in a valley or a heavy grove of
trees, we’ll put up a little tower where we can
get a signal and trench a cable to the house."
Unfortunately microwave-based
systems aren’t available everywhere. If
they’re not, a two-way satellite system will often be a good option. Rick Hodgkinson, CEO of Galaxy Broadband, a Canadian satellite Internet provider, says a good rule of thumb is if you can get satellite TV you can get satellite Internet.
"One of the advantages we’ve got is we
provide services pretty well anywhere,"
Hodgkinson says, "One customer who comes
to mind is a lady who had a beautiful home
up in the mountains in British Columbia. She
worked from home as a software developer
for a large technology company. Once a week
she had to take files and disks and storage devices down to town and spend a day transferring
them to her employer. After we installed
our system, she could do it all from home."
The system might not be for everyone,
Hodgkinson cautions. Latency, something
television viewers know as satellite delay, can
be a problem with some applications. It takes
about 500 milliseconds for the signal to make
the round trip between your computer and
the satellite. That might not seem like a lot of
time, but if your 10-year-old son likes playing
shoot-em-up games on the Internet, it’s long
enough to cause him to lose every time.
Cost competitive. The cost of having a satellite or a microwave-based system has come down dramatically in the past few years. Monthly costs are now very competitive with telephone or cable high-speed systems. There are initial equipment costs to absorb, Hodgkinson says, but in most cases a homeowner can purchase a system and have it professionally installed for under $600.
Satellite systems need to be installed professionally and be precisely aimed, since the
signal is bounced off a 20-foot antenna orbiting
23,000 miles above the equator.
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