No more Morenet: City of Morden cutting cord on plan to provide free internet for all residents

Residents in the southern Manitoba city of Mordenwill have to say goodbye to their relatively new high-speed, community-owned internet this month less than 18 months after it started.

As of Oct. 30, Morenet the wireless internet service provided as a City of Morden service will be shutting down all operations, the city announced in an online update late Monday.

"It ballooned out of control," said Mayor Brandon Burley.

The city of roughly 8,000 announced the internet service in April 2018, saying it would be built and maintained by the city through property taxes and offered at no extra monthly fee to users, following a $400 installation fee.

The whole project was estimated to cost between $300,000 and $400,000, and city officials said at the timeproperty taxes wouldn't increase to cover the cost.

Costs skyrocketed

But Burley said the city hit a hurdle when it learned about technicalchallenges related to bandwidth thatmade the annual costof providing free internet service skyrocket.

"It's in the many millions of dollars, and the operating cost would make it our second-biggest utility," said Burley, who was elected in the October 2018 municipal election months after the service's May launch.

"The previous council made the right decision to approve it" based on the information they had at the time, Burley said, but "those numbers have inflated ... between 700 and 1,000 per cent."

The new city councilfound out about the major cost hike in May of this year, and triedunsuccessfully to sell Morenet, before coming to the decision to cancel it ata recent council meeting.

"We sat down with the project, with experts, and considered it as though it were a brand new project," Burley said.

We acknowledge that we have some of the worst connection speedsprobably in the countrydown here.- MordenMayor Brandon Burley

He said the majority of the spike in the expected cost came froma misunderstanding about the capacity of telecommunications infrastructure available in the Morden area.

The planwould require upgrading the city to fibre optic connections an expensive fix. Burley said council was concerned that the service would be unable to "resist inflation," and the city wasn't ready to explore other funding models.

By the time the service was cut, it hadmade it intoabout 450homes in the city.

"We had only gotten the service to aboutone outof every eight households before we had already surpassed the budget quite substantially," Burley said.

"The majority of people in Morden, myself included, never got Morenet but we were paying for it through our taxes."

Although there are still options to access privateinternet providers, service quality and speed can range in the rural community,depending on location.The city is stilltrying to figure out how to resolve inequities.

"We acknowledge that we have some of the worst connection speedsprobably in the countrydown here. And it's really difficult to build a community, an economy, in that context," Burley said.

As an alternative, Burley said the city has "aggressively pursued" talks with fibre companies and big internet companies to figure outhow to provide high-speed internet to the community. Burley said the city has picked updiscussions with BellMTS andValley Fiber a technology firm based out of Winkler on how to proceed.

Meanwhile, residents who paid the $400 installation fee expecting to pay no monthly charges after that won't be able to get a refund for the fee.

Reaction to the announcement on social media ranged, with some users on the city's Facebook page saying they were disappointed to see it go, and others saying the city made a prudent decision.