The story behind TDC Broadband

The little company with big dreams of providing broadband to rural users in Nova Scotia was finished, the three brothers – Dennis, Ted and Carter Cockerill – financially ruined and the users in Queens County left with silent towers, rooftop receivers and cables and routers attached to their computer systems.

TDC Broadband had set up a wireless internet service that was fast and effective, capable of serving as a model for the rest of the province. The brothers were as knowledgeable as any in Nova Scotia in using emerging wireless technology to bring broadband to areas bigger companies would not service.

What they did not have was the kind of support the government decided to give another company, in Cumberland County. TDC soldiered on, scrounging private venture capital and going to family and friends, planning on pushing into Lunenburg County to give it the kind of subscriber base it needed to be successful.

Their plan was to set up towers in Baker Settlement and along the LaHave River to provide coverage to the larger populations in middle and southern Lunenburg County. A representative of TDC told me when the company once again had conversations with the government, they were assured that funding would be available soon, knowing that the Nova Scotia premier’s announced intention was to bring high speed internet to all of Nova Scotia by 2009. This funding never came to be.

Lunenburg County residents who had sent in cheques to TDC in order to get connected had those cheques given back to them by TDC, when the company realized it did not have the money to continue with its expansion plans.

I talked with Dennis Cockerill, one of the brothers who owned TDC and who was the company’s network engineer. He said he felt defeated, and that he was as surprised as anyone in Caledonia when the circuit went down on Monday. “We got beat up by the government and others and it took the wind out of our sails.”

Dennis said TDC had pulled out of its association with the accounting people with whom the company had been working. They then would not release their accounting material for the company, he said. At this late stage, the government wanted to do a third party audit of the company so it could help TDC recreate its financial records and perhaps offer some type of help.

However, they couldn’t do that without the accounting records, Dennis said. “Without that, the government couldn’t help the company recreate its financial records, and we were finished. We put our heart and soul into our small business, and we’ve lost everything. I hope this isn’t a new trend for our government, not supporting small business growth in Nova Scotia, especially one that was trying to help fulfill its mandate to the people of rural Nova Scotia.”

He said as long as TDC was in place the government had finally decided that the first two areas to get funding from the $10-million would be Lunenburg and Queens. Without the accounting documents, however, that could not happen. TDC and others worked to get the material released, but to no avail.

Dennis Cockerill said it had been a long, hard road. He said that despite the government’s last-minute willingness to be involved, it had failed TDC and the people of Queens County miserably. “The fact that they gave $430,000 to a company for a new pilot In Cumberland County using technology we had already proven here in Queens County just doesn’t make sense. The word is that they are having trouble making broadband work in Cumberland County, where we had a very robust and very functional broadband service in one of the harshest terrains in Nova Scotia. We were fully capable of helping the government fulfill its commitment to the rural broadband initiative.”

He said the province had “based its entire wireless initiative on TDC’s model. We have a 50-kilometre footprint,” he said, “where the other new pilot can so far only get an eight-kilometre footprint. They don’t have the knowledge and experience with this hardware that we have accumulated over the past four years. We know the technology. We worked through the glitches and terrain issues and everything worked very well.”

He also said the premier wants to set it up so that broadband would be installed in rural areas for a hundred dollars, but that was impossible, unless it subsidized installations for constituents in each county. - Tom Sheppard can be reached at tsheppar@ca.inter.net (note the missing “d”)