Broadband arrives in parts of North Frontenac

Jeff Green | Jun 10, 2010

Maureen O'Higgins and North Frontenac Mayor, Ron maguire

Although it isn’t bringing high-speed internet service to as much of North Frontenac as originally planned, the Rural Connections Network is now up and running in Cloyne and the surrounding area.

Omniglobe Networks, the company that will be offering the service, already has a presence in Cloyne and Plevna from the installation of small towers above North Addington Education Centre and Clarendon Central Public School. Those towers supply fixed wireless high-speed internet service to the two schools and homeowners in the immediate vicinity of the schools.

At a launch event at the Barrie Hall in Cloyne on June 4, officials from Omniglobe and the Township of North Frontenac were in attendance, as were a number of people interested in getting high-speed internet service at their homes and businesses.

The new service is provided by a receiver that has been installed part of the way up the TVO tower located north of Cloyne, and Omniglobe expects to be able to serve some of the residents on Marble, Mazinaw, Mississagagon and Skootamatta Lakes from that location.

“The project will provide access to high-speed internet for approximately 500 full-time residents and 1300 seasonal residents,” said David Torres, the business development manager for Omniglobe who has managed the project from the company’s end.

Originally, Omniglobe had intended to serve the Ompah and Snow Road areas as well as some of the lakes north of Plevna with this project, but in the end they did not see how they could turn a profit providing that service in the current economic climate. “We realize that we may not be able to provide service to every resident in the township but we believe this is a step in the right direction,” Torres added.

By cutting the project back, Omniglobe passed up a fair bit of provincial grant money, but they also saved a significant amount of their own money.

The provincial grant program would have provided up to $334,000 to the project, requiring an investment of $668,000 from Omniglobe. In the end the government will be providing about $66,000 and Omniglobe another $134,000.

Nonetheless, North Frontenac Mayor Ron Maguire was upbeat about the project. “It's a start,” he said, “our partnership with Omniglobe has been successful and we hope to work with Omniglobe to expand this service offering.”

Maureen O'Higgins is a consultant with Actionable Intelligence who was hired by North Frontenac and Frontenac County to secure the grant and manage the project from the municipal end. She cited the global recession as the major reason that Omniglobe pulled back from their original commitment. “They did their best but with the change in the global money supply, the challenging terrain, and low population density of much of North Frontenac, this was all they could do,” she said.

While the funding for the current provincial program is now gone, O'Higgins said that a new funding program is already on stream. It will be used to bring increased bandwidth capacity to Eastern Ontario as a whole over the next year, and will then concern itself with rural and remote service delivery.

“We don't know yet how that will roll out,” O'Higgins said.

With the speeches over, Omniglobe officials began meeting with potential clients, who set up appointments for technicians to visit their homes. Before service can be provided, a site visit is necessary to determine if a viable signal is present at a given site.

Omniglobe can be reached at 1-888-365-6664.