New SaskTel connections for Northern Saskatchewan

Jeff McKeand, director of customer service and operations for SaskTel in Prince Albert said the partnership will open up all the northern communities.

“This additional bandwidth allows us to bring all types of exciting communications services that will help the health offices, the band offices, the local residential people, it will be a huge step forward in the latest and greatest in communication technologies,” McKeand said.

He said having cell service in the north is very important, “Our existing infrastructure up there was at capacity and its older style infrastructure so it’s very good to be able to provide a fiber backbone that can carry the new latest and greatest services,” McKeand said.

Who SaskTel is partnering with

Huawei is a “global information and communications technology solutions provider.”

This project is the largest contribution of its kind they’ve made in Canada, said Scott Bradley, vice-president of corporate and government affairs for Huawei.

“We’re very excited to be deploying our technology in these communities and I think it reflects, again, just the commitment that SaskTel and the province of Saskatchewan have to ensuring all residents in Saskatchewan have access to world class technologies. We’re very proud of our role here in Canada in terms of bringing innovative and new technologies to Canada and so to be able to partner with SaskTel and with the Athabasca Basin Development Corporation, we’re very proud to do so,” Bradley said.

Huawei has been working with SaskTel for about four years now and in that time, they’ve been able to deploy SaskTel’s 4G network and just recently wired the province to Long Term Evolution (LTE).

Bradley said they are also in the process of deploying another new technology in number of communities on a trial basis for now.

“We’ve done a number of things in terms of really ensuring we’ve kept SaskTel and the province at the edge and upfront in terms of technology deployment,” Bradley said.

Huawei will be supplying $385,000 in cell equipment for the four sites.

Geoff Gay, CEO of Athabasca Basin Development said in a release, “There is incredible potential for business and economic development in the Athabasca region, but one of the most significant challenges for the remote area is accessibility. These cell phone towers will greatly increase connectivity, which leads to so many benefits for the people and business climate in the region. This contribution gives us an opportunity to do something that will make a real and lasting impact on the Athabasca communities, and we are very pleased to be a partners in this exciting initiative for Saskatchewan’s north.”

Athabasca Basin Development is providing $249,000 for the project.

The towers are expected to be completed by 2015 with construction of the towers beginning once the infrastructure is in place.

The total cost of the project was $5.8 million, and after SaskTel did an economic analysis of the project they had a shortfall of $634,000. This is where the contributions from Huawei and Athabasca Basin Development come in.

swallace@panow.com

Twitter: @sarahthesquid

by Sarah Wallace

New SaskTel connections for Northern Saskatchewan

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