Residents of Westlock will soon have direct fibre optic Internet access as part of a multi-million-dollar investment by telecom giant Telus Communications.
Telus’ $9 million upgrade promises to bring the ability to deliver 150 megabit per second (Mb/s) download speeds to every household and business in the Town of Westlock.
The telecommunication company has broken the upgrade down into three distinct stages, beginning with the installation of a main line from Telus’ central office, which currently sits at 85 per cent completion.
Once the main line is complete, technicians will then branch the fibre optic cable to separate community hubs, then begin the final phase, residential installation.
“The next phase will be to bring the fibre directly to residents and businesses,” Telus media representative Liz Sauvé said. “That’s going to start once the weather warms up and the snow moves out.”
In order to dig through to individual properties, installation technicians must wait for the ground to thaw.
Easier working conditions will allow technicians to complete the upgrades town-wide in one fluid process, something that was an issue in the installation of similar upgrades in Edmonton.
“One of the worst things that could happen is to have fragmented areas in terms of the service you provide, where if someone on one side of the street gets one level of service and the other gets a different level of service,” computer sciences professor Ioanis Nikolaidis, from the University of Alberta, said.
“You don’t want to be doing this changes incrementally in terms of deployment, but be willing and committed to do the upgrades across the entire area.”
The upgrade will help keep Westlock competitive with other municipalities as Internet use becomes more commoditized and necessary to economic prosperity, said mayor Ralph Leriger.
Significantly, Telus’ fibre optic installations are gigabit enabled, meaning that, although service is currently capped at 150 Mb/s, the cables will be able to handle future development as Internet requirements increase from megabits per second to the exponentially faster gigabit standard.
“The fact that the network is gigabit enabled is really future-proofing the community of Westlock,” Sauvé said.
“The bandwidth and capacity of the fibre is near limitless.”
The improvement has received positive reaction from town officials, who are just as happy with the new service capabilities as its price.
“When we first received the announcement [Telus representatives informed us] that only 10 per cent of North America is connected to fibre. I thought the number would be higher, but certainly, in this world, that gives Westlock a leg up,” Leriger said.
“There’s a window of opportunities at least until the rest of the world catches up. It will be up to us to explore those opportunities and try to quantify which ones are real and do-able for our little town.”
For residents who don’t subscribe to Telus, alternatives still exist. Currently, Shaw offers 120 Mb/s Internet speeds to approximately 96 per cent its subscribers.
In 2010, Shaw briefly offered gigabit Internet service on a trial basis to assess consumer demand, but has since discontinued the service due to lack of demand. Shaw’s network uses a fibre backbone with coaxial cables connections leading to individual residential properties.
While residents can look forward to the Telus upgrades as soon as late 2016, in the meantime, they should be sure to update contact information with their Internet service provider and power company, as upgrades may cause power outages.
“People will probably need to make sure that whoever is their energy service provider has an accurate phone number, because that’s the database that Fortis will use for informing residents of outages,” Leriger said.
