CASEY’S RESTAURANT has been a popular watering hole in Timmins for years. Right on Highway 101, which bisects the Northern Ontario town, everyone knows where it is and being a chain, those passing through recognize the name and often stop to eat on their way home from, or deeper into, the far north.
Also on the property, in behind the eatery, sits an Ontera telecom vault.
For the uninitiated, Ontera is the telecom subsidiary of the Ontario Northland Transportation Commission. It provides backbone services in and out of – and around – the north to larger centres like Sault Ste. Marie, Sudbury, Timmins and North Bay, but also to smaller communities such as Hearst, Cochrane, Foleyet, Fort Albany, Chapleau and tiny Peawanuck, the northernmost community in the province.
It’s also an ILEC to about 5,000 customers in Iroquois Falls, Temagami, Marten River, Moosonee and Moose Factory and it quietly launched as a CLEC in Timmins and North Bay recently.
The railroad and telecom company both date back to 1902, when the telecom portion was just the telegraph that tracked the trains shuttling people and goods in and out of the resource-rich north. “We still run that system,” said Amedeo Bernardi, Ontera’s director of project management and strategy in a recent interview with Cartt.ca. “Well, a ’70s version of it,” added Tracy Cant, the company’s director of finance and regulatory. The company is just about done an upgrade on that communications branch, too, however.
The telco encircles about 550,000 people spread out over about 200,000 square kms – so servicing its network often requires drive time on ice roads, snowmobiles, helicopter, ATVs, and assorted other tractor-like rides.
Some of its “truck rolls” can get pretty complicated since a number of the company’s service rigs are equipped with campers, complete with rations, in case techs are stranded by weather.
One hundred and seven years later, Ontera is a separate subsidiary of the train and bus company which can now also provide broadband service over a brand new, $12-million fibre ring, while also offering vastly improved connectivity to other carriers and major corporations like mines in the north.
But back to that concrete vault at Casey’s.
In the fall of 2006, a band of thieves were breaking into restaurants across Northern Ontario taking safes, recalled Bernardi. At the Timmins Casey’s break-in, the crooks decided to cut the wires at the pedestal they found at the restaurant, probably thinking they’d disable any alarm, he guesses.
Ontera got more than those criminals bargained for, however because when they chopped through the fibre optic cable going into and out of that box, most of Timmins (pop. 43,000) was cut off. Phone, Internet, 911, wireless backhaul. “Everything was cut off,” said Bernardi.
They got the safe – and Ontera got a hard lesson about hardening its network. They knew a major upgrade was a must. Quickly. Cutting off an entire town just can’t happen in our hyper-connected world.
So the company got to work.
Actually, it got to work on diversifying and upgrading years ago, when the CRTC deregulated the long distance market in 2001. Ontera, or ONTel as it was once called, was the monopoly long distance provider in its region and it had to re-think what it was going to be when the margins for LD were decimated. (This paragraph has been corrected to reflect the company’s correct prior name).
It decided that being a “carriers’ carrier” was the “sweet spot,” added Bernardi.
But mid-decade, its hardware had already grown ancient by telecom standards. It was good enough to carry a few thousand long distance calls and some other things, but to carry high definition video or the myriad broadband options folks everywhere are craving and demanding, an overhaul was a must.
And instead of turning to the government for funding, Ontera turned to a major chartered bank for private financing (“backed by a business plan that features organic growth in customers,” said Bernardi) and in May completed the build of its new 1,000-km fibre ring that features a 10-gig (scalable up to 80) and connects Timmins, Foleyet, North Bay, Chapleau and Sudbury.
No more will small-time thieves cut off a town’s telecom service, thanks to this new ring. If there’s some kind of cut (which can happen with derailments as parts of the route are along the rail lines) signals automatically reroute “within 150 milliseconds,” added Cant. This is important not only for regular communications, but also for enabling e-health services.
The ring also brings broadband communications into this century for the region. Much of the former electronics were at least 20 years old, meaning the highest speeds the company could offer in some of its remote areas were T1-level speeds (remember when THAT was the standard?)
“Before this we were pretty restricted with the amount of bandwidth we could offer up north,” said Bernardi, who added that Sweden’s Transmode was the supplier of choice for the company.
Now, Ontera can really serve its mandate of bringing the bandwidth available in Southern Ontario urban centres to its northern population.
And this is crucial to the economies in their communities because there weren’t – and aren’t – a lot of companies clamouring to spend $12 million to build a network that for much of it passes only hundreds of thousands of trees and millions of black flies. “Quite frankly, no one else would do this. Between us and a couple of other carriers, we’re it,” said Bernardi.
“We’re now going out and marketing our network, making sure essential services and choice are available to carriers to be able to get all those customers. It’s also about the growth of good jobs in Northern Ontario, high tech jobs, highly skilled – and enabling that to occur even in remote parts of Ontario.”
