More coverage for Queens in the works

Within 60 days, people in areas like Greenfield, Chelsea and Pleasant River should be able to hook up to broadband Internet, as the company providing service to North Queens expands into Lunenburg County.

TDC Broadband is erecting two new towers, one in Baker Settlement and one in Kingsburg. The towers will provide service to rural areas in middle, eastern and southern Queens County. The Baker Settlement tower – expected to be up and running in thirty days – will cover large parts of Lunenburg County, including the Hemford and New Germany areas, while the Kingsburg tower will reach into Queens in the west and past the eastern edge of Lunenburg County.

Mike Himmelmann, operations manager for TDC, told me last week that the company was about to carry out testing, to see if there were any geographical issues that would affect service. He said interested people should contact the company in order to be put on a list.

These are exciting times for the company, which only last summer came close to being knocked out when financial assistance from the province did not materialize. After the province provided seed money to the Region of Queens for the project, the northern Queens County installation was expected to be a pilot project with application to the rest of the province. For reasons unknown, the province did not follow through.

Because of that, the high-speed service, which had been installed in my house on May 17, was shut down on early in July. Since the big companies, Aliant and Eastlink, had no intention of investing in a market the size of rural Queens County, we were left with the depressing feeling that we had lost our chance to be a part of the high-speed Internet world.

The company in Queens County needed approximately $150,000 to get them to the next level of development of the service, but the door was shut on them by the province’s office of Economic Development.

The company was able to come up with private financing from out of the province, however. On the first of October, technicians arrived to reconnect us, and now I can watch the BBC World Service news or download a constant stream of Celtic music at will. Our service survived by the skin of its teeth and the hard work of TDC Broadband.

It is therefore annoying to hear the news that a Sydney company is getting provincial funding to bring high speed internet to rural Cumberland County – and that the service is being called a pilot project for the rest of the province. Excuse me, but a perfectly good pilot project is already up and running right here on the South Shore, no thanks to politicians in Halifax.

The province’s same Office of Economic Development is described as leading the Cumberland County project. It is investing $430,000 in the project, money that does not belong to the OED, but rather is collected from you and me. Not only that, but the premier has promised that the company can use public towers for its transmissions. It is enough to make you completely cynical about our provincial government and the bureaucrats it employs.

The news reports said that the Sydney company, Seaside Communications, will work with the province to develop a business model that can be used in other rural areas of the province, mainly using wireless technology. Guess what? That is exactly what TDC Broadband has been doing, and its successful business model is already there.

I am actually happy that our high-speed service is up and running without the support of the provincial government. The Cumberland County service will cost customers between $50 and $55 a month, while we are paying $39 to $49 a month.

And it fits in with the kind of people we are in Queens County, where a modern health centre was built in Caledonia without provincial government assistance.

Tom Sheppard can be reached at tsheppard@tdcmail.ca.