Nunavut's internet appetite creates bandwidth concerns

The growing demand for broadband internet service in Nunavut is causing some bandwidth bottlenecks for the territory's high-speed provider.

Since launching its satellite-based broadband service in 2005, the Nunavut Broadband Development Corp.'s Qiniq service has had more subscribers than expected. At this time, about 3,700 Nunavut residents are Qiniq customers.

"The numbers have more than exceeded our expectations," NBDC chairman Darrell Ohokannoak told CBC News on Thursday.

"In our initial projection, we thought that 2,000 would be sufficient, and we've way exceeded that and gone into our ninth-year projections."

Qiniq's success has created the development corporation's biggest challenge, project manager Lorraine Thomas said: how to deal with the growing bandwidth demands of such a large number of users.

Unlike most broadband services in the southern provinces, which rely on fibre-optic cable to transmit data from one point to another, Qiniq must rely on satellites as the backbone of its service.

That results in already limited bandwidth that has been spread thin with a growing customer base, Thomas said.

"If you imagine that you lived in a desert, you would become very good at managing your water, right? Because it's your biggest, most difficult thing, expensive thing. You don't waste it," she said.

"That's what it's like in Nunavut. Our biggest, most expensive, difficult thing to access is satellite bandwidth. It's hundreds of times more expensive to transfer data over satellite than it is over a fibre line between Ottawa and Toronto."

The NBDC has received subsidies from the federal government to pay for its bandwidth, but that funding only supports 2,000 subscribers.

'It makes a big difference'

Both Thomas and Ohokannoak said Qiniq's bandwidth issues will be addressed in the near future.

Despite concerns about bandwidth, Thomas said the corporation is very proud of how well it has done.

"I'm so pleased to have had the opportunity to meet so many people who've said, 'This is a great thing, you know. It makes a big difference. I can sell more art, I can do this, I can do that, my kids are on it learning new things,'" she said.

"It's just a great, exciting thing to see this happen. Now, we've got lots of bumps and lumps to fix yet."