ATHABASCA - Some people yearn to escape from the city life — the traffic, the pollution, the sirens blaring from all directions — but when they find their idyllic, rural paradise, they often also find there are a few things missing.
That complete lifestyle change was something John Brix and his family undertook seven years ago when he left his job as a member of the Calgary Police Service and took up residence north of Athabasca where he now works remotely for one of the largest IT companies in the world, which he could not name, due to a confidentiality agreement.
For Brix, the speed and reliability of his Internet service is integral to his job, as it is for many others in Canada’s rural areas. High speed Internet service providers have been working on solutions for rural residents for years, as have all levels of government and the organizations adjacent to them, but there is still a lot to be desired, and universal access is far from reality. That’s why Brix is looking to the stars.
“Working for one of the largest IT companies in the world, you start to realize how important all this is, and what really spurred me to look at Starlink was because of COVID. I still work, but now on remote basis like a lot of people do,” said Brix in a recent interview. “I was on the hunt for a better provider because that's one of the downsides to Athabasca, the Wi-Fi is, it's really not substantial and here we don't have the infrastructure.”
If you haven’t heard of Starlink, you’ve likely heard of its parent company SpaceX and its CEO Elon Musk, who is also responsible for the development of Tesla, the electric car company, and before that the rise of PayPal. He now uses the reusable rockets developed by SpaceX to launch satellites into low-Earth orbit with the goal of providing high-speed, low-latency broadband Internet to areas that were previously under served, from Africa to northern Canada.
Satellite Internet is nothing new, but Starlink’s satellites are much closer to Earth, which reduces the time it takes to send data from one point to the next. The further away the satellite is, the higher the latency, which hinders many activities like video-calling and online gaming with constant buffering.
That’s not the case anymore for the Brix family, which had the Starlink system installed a couple weeks ago. They are part of the initial beta testing, but the company hopes to launch more and more satellites in the coming months, for even better and faster service across the globe.
“It’s been a great experience so far. I'm getting at least a minimum of twice the bandwidth, compared to the best provider before. On average we are getting three times the bandwidth, so I can be on a video conference and the kids can be gaming and it doesn’t sound like you're talking in a bathtub full of water anymore.”
Right now, in the beta stage, Brix is getting speeds of 60-90 mbps (megabits per second), while the future alpha version promises up to 200 mbps or more. The system is constantly updated, so it won’t become obsolete and an internal heater makes the outdoor equipment — which resembles a typical satellite TV set-up — functional in any weather.
Brix has high hopes for the technology, predicting it will be comparable to fiber optics very soon, but available anywhere in the world.
The monthly cost is also comparable to other providers. Brix said he paid just over $700 upfront for the required hardware, and is looking at approximately $120 per month to use the service, which he is very satisfied with to this point.
“This is a way that rural Athabasca can grow in a really positive way where we’re not relying on the ebb and flow of any economy. It will diversify Athabasca, and it’s good for the region, because the more people that live here, the higher the tax bases. And it’s really good for small businesses — the more people we get here, the healthier it is,” said Brix.
