Cell-Gap project starting to deliver service in Frontenac

Jeff Green | May 15, 2024

Most of the new cell towers in Frontenac County to come on stream in 2026

In their annual presentation to a joint meeting of the four Frontenac Township Councils, representatives from the Eastern Ontario Regional Network (EORN) provided an update on the EORN Cell-Gap coverage project.

Marco Smits, a policy analyst with EORN, said that the goal of the project was to provide basic cellphone service to 99% of the population in 13 rural municipalities in Eastern Ontario. The project also has a goal of delivering cell and basic data services to 95% of those residents, and what he called high-definition service, enough data for video streaming, to 85% of those households.

The $300 million project, which began in 2020 thanks to matching $71 million federal and provincial grants, and $10 million from the 13 municipalities, found a provider, Rogers Communications, in 2021. Rogers had committed a minimum of $150 million of their own money to the project.

The Frontenac County exenditure is $17 million of the $300 million total.

The whole project includes putting up 257 brand new towers, “uplifting” 312 existing towers by installing new equipment on them, and 75 “co-location” projects, wherein Rogers attaches their new equipment to a tower that is owned by a third party.

Thus far, almost all (308 of 312) of the upgrades have taken place, and most (51 of 75) of the co-location projects have been completed. The new towers have been slower to get done, as the process is more involved. 41 of the 257 are currently in service, leaving 206 to be completed

“In Frontenac County, specifically, 13 new towers are scheduled and none of them have been completed,” Smits said.

He added that three planned “uplifts” in Frontenac County have been completed, as well as three of six scheduled “co-location” projects.

Of the 13 new towers, three are scheduled for 2024. They are: Jewel Road and Little Pond Road (North Frontenac) - Opinicon Road and Maple Leaf Road (South Frontenac), and Dewitt Road at Timmerman’s Island (South Frontenac)

In 2025, another three towers are scheduled to be up and running, all in Central Frontenac: Henderson Road at Henderson, Bernard Lane and Wilkinson Road, and Road 38 and Richard Branigan Trail.

Finally, in the last year of the project, 2026, seven towers will be coming on line. These are: Ardoch Road (Central Frontenac), CF Long Lake road and Middle Road (Central Frontenac), Mattawachan Road at Wilson Road (North Frontenac), Sunday Lake Drive and Cruise Road (North Frontenac), Devil Lake Road and Little Wolfe Lake (South Frontenac), Westport Road and Little White Lake (South Frontenac), and Moreland Dixon Road and South Frontenac Road 12 (South Frontenac)

Lisa Severson, Communications Director for EORN, pointed out that EORN follows a fiscal year end of March 1, so residents in the vicinity of the towers may have to wait until the spring of the following year for the service to come online.

Local municipalities have been involved in finalising approvals for the locations of new towers, a process leading to a “Land Use Authority” designation which allows the towers to go up. In Frontenac County, 10 of 13 “Land Use Authorities” have been finalised, leaving three still pending.

Warden Francis Smith, who sat on the EORN Board when the Cell-Gap project was getting underway, recalled that Frontenac County Municipalities contracted out the Land Use Authority Process to a company called CRINS, which specialises in this kind of work, but the work was not completed.

“A lot of the delay with the towers was on our end,” she said. “because we were working with the CRINS group who weren’t doing the job that they should have been doing, and it held everything up until finally we said enough is enough and we took it back ourselves. That was a big delay that we shouldn’t have ae had and we should have acted on it sooner.”

As the Cell-Gap project heads towards completion, it leaves EORN with an organizational challenge. Along with the Cell service, EORN was set up to help develop Internet and High Speed Internet service in Eastern Ontario, and the latest incarnation of those efforts was a proposed Gigabit to the home project for the region.

However, bringing fibre optic Internet Service to Ontario residents was taken on directly by the provincial government through the Ministry of Infrastructure’s “Accelerated High Speed Internet Program” leaving EORN looking for new work to take on.

As explained by EORN Executive Officer Jason St. Pierre, EORN has taken on a role I helping to identify opportunities and facilitate efforts by its member counties’ to build 7,000 new hosing units over the next 7 years.

This involved a recently completed research project, as well as work helping to advance communal water and sewer servicing for rural housing developments, and initiative the Frontenac County has been a leader in developing by establishing the first communal servicing corporation in Ontario.

“It is a bit different from me to be talking about communal servicing to this group,” said St. Pierre, “but we are working to spread the word to other municipalities and to help Frontenac move forward with this in and way we can.