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2009-08-26 -Cape Breton Post - Residents to learn when dial-up modems will be retired for good

NANCY KING

The Cape Breton Post

SYDNEY — Residents of rural Cape Breton communities without access to broadband Internet will learn when the frustrating sound of a dial-up modem will become a thing of the past during a series of community meetings taking place across the island.

Seaside High-Speed, which is bringing faster Internet service to communities under the Broadband for Rural Nova Scotia initiative, is holding a series of meetings in communities across Cape Breton to update residents on the progress of building the network and when the service will become available.

Adam Conter, a spokesperson for Seaside, said meetings that have been held to date have attracted good attendance, despite little advance advertising, and the fact that they were held in small communities. “Broadband Internet is quite popular in rural areas, we hear a large exhale when the name of someone’s community comes up on the screen during a presentation and that’s always a good feeling,” he said.

In the past 12 months, Seaside has built more than 100 structures across its territory to support the rollout of broadband, compared with 32 the previous year, Conter said.

Most recently, over the past six to eight weeks, a lot of progress has been made, he said. “The main complaints are, ‘why don’t I have it yet?’” Conter said. “Everyone is very anxious and we are excited to get it to them, so we do require a bit of patience.” He added Seaside has tried to keep them up to date on the progress of the work.

As time has gone on and as the company has come to better understand permitting processes and developed relationships with communities, Conter said it has encountered fewer challenges in building the towers. The challenge now comes in installation, in ensuring that each customer has access to a tower. If the company isn’t able to provide access, it has to go back and assess locations to find a solution to bringing them high speed.

Seaside has almost completed building the main infrastructure, the next phase will be to build micro-sites, which will allow it to fill in signal holes, areas where due to the topography the signal can’t penetrate without a smaller repeater tower, Conter said.

Seaside, a Cape Breton-based communications company, won a contract in 2007 with the province to provide broadband Internet access to rural communities left out of the high-speed loop.

The province is striving for 100 per cent broadband access across Nova Scotia by the end of the year. Conter said if winter weather co-operates, they should be able to meet that goal in Cape Breton.