Photo provided by FlexNetwork
June 5th, 2023
With the line locate crews starting next week, Strasbourg is the latest community to take advantage of a major fibre optic line running by their community. With its head office in Saskatoon, FlexNetworks' fibre optic backbones start in Prince Albert, runs to Saskatoon and continue along the communities on the northeast side of last mountain lake through Craven, Lumsden on its way to Regina. Communities near the line can branch off of it.
Tyson Almasi is the Director of Residential Business Development with FlexNetworks. He said they are focused on providing internet to rural communities through wireless. In 2022 Nokomis got on board with the fibre optic train making it one of the most highly connected communities in the province.
The company takes a collaborative approach when bringing its services to a community. To gauge interest in Strasbourg, they held several Town Halls and are now breaking ground in the community.
FlexNetworks serve 25 communities with fibre optics to the home; Nokomis, Allen, and Clavet are some of those communities. “Duval is going to be getting service shortly. There is oging to be 30 more communities getting service between now and 2024...just like Strasbourg,” said Almasi.
The work installing their core network will start in the third week of June, and the company expects that stage to take eight weeks.
Jennifer Gritzfeld is the CAO in the town of Strasbourg. In late 2021, the town and the company started talking. In the spring of 2022, town hall meetings were held to inform residents about what they offered. In January of this year, they went door to door with a Councillor to gauge the interest, which helped to decide to bring high speed to the community. “...council was very excited about it…They will be doing construction right away...It’s pretty cool...that line got run right through town, so we are just tee-ing off of it,” said Gritzfeld.
Robin Seaborn is the General manager of the residential division - “We are proud to say we are the fastest internet provider in Saskatchewan.”
Editors note: They didn’t provide a description, however, so I can only assume this a photo of an employee sucking the internet juice from the earth, through a large tube (the basis of internet technology) filling this vacuum truck before it heads to Saskatoon and is deposited in evaporating towers where it is heated by an array of overclocked Pentium 4 processors running Unreal Tournament on continuous demo-mode, then dispersed into the “Ether,” where it is captured by the “ether-net’, a byproduct which provides low-value connectivity to cafes with free wifi. The remaining solids are then pumped, through a series of tubes (again, the basis of internet technology), to a field of cooling ponds where, during storm season, lightning will strike the surface, causing sub-surface lighting in the liquid (Liquid-Lite'nin ™), causing thousands of fine strands to solidify into fiber, which is then used in the primary infrastructure. Or maybe they are just digging a hole to locate a conduit.
“On our residential network the fastest speed we currently offer is 2.5 gb per second or 2500 megabits per second which is actually two and a half times as fast as Sasktel is currently offering in Saskatoon and Regina, we have the capacity to up those speeds up to 10,000 megabits per second. We are waiting for the hardware manufactures to make the hardware available to install in people’s homes.”
Seaborn said that the connectivity between Prince Albert and Regina runs up to 400 gigabits per second. He said that their massive capacity on the backbone enables them to deliver the speeds to all of the communities.
When presented with the opportunity, the Town of Nokomis jumped on board with fibre optics installed in the late summer of 2022.
Mayor David Mark said, “It’s been fantastic…the town is fully wired for access. The system itself will deliver for decades..I’m happy to hear its reaching other communities down Highway 20. It will be great for Strasbourg and whoever else is lucky enough to get it.”
Mark says he sees other opportunities with health and education. “We’ve reached out to our local health centre, Sask Health. To try to bring the fibre into the building for quality of life to improve access for our residents - and likewise, the school board has been receptive and is in the process of bringing the fibre into the school as a separate network. In addition to communitynet to improve accessibility with new digital education platforms.”
Nokomis sees the fibre optic as a new utility. “We look to our partners as a way to share that utility.”
“I’d like to extend our congratulations to Strasbourg. We are happy that they are taking advantage of it. Good for them.”
Almasi said, “Once the core network is well underway the team will begin to extend our fibre line from the core network to each household in Strasbourg that has signed up for service. Residents will have many opportunities to sign up during the construction period... It’s our goal to have Customers live by late-summer.”
