FORT NELSON, B.C. – On Monday, Northwestel officially launched Cable Home Phone in Fort Nelson, a community of about 5,000 residents in northeastern British Columbia.
A new long distance plan is available as part of the offering, providing unlimited, anytime long distance calling for just $9.95/month when bundled with Northwestel’s digital TV and internet services.
“Cable Home Phone is a common way of delivering phone service in southern Canada but it is new to the North,” said Curtis Shaw, Northwestel vice president of marketing. “As part of this project, Northwestel invested more than $200,000 to improve the reliability of the Fort Nelson cable network, including placing back-up power infrastructure throughout the city. Cable internet and other advanced services will continue to work in the event of any commercial power interruption.”
THE COMPANY ALSO ANNOUNCED on Monday that it and Falcon Communications are delivering higher speed broadband internet services to nine Northwest Territories communities.
“Northwestel is very pleased with the success of our partnership with Falcon Communications,” said Paul Flaherty, president and CEO of Northwestel, in a press release. “Effective July 9, 2012 all communities in the Northwest Territories now have access to high-speed internet, all at comparable prices. This is a significant step forward for communications in the North.”
Residents of Colville Lake, Deline, Gameti, Holman, Lutselk’e, Paulatuk, Trout Lake, Sachs Harbour, Ulukhaktok (Holman), and Wekweeti now have access to Northwestel’s DSL internet service which provides digital data transmission over local telephone network wires, allowing for faster transmission speeds and a higher quality internet experience.
Northwestel has designed and is implementing next generation satellite infrastructure to deliver internet services to customers in these nine communities. A further phase of this project will deliver mobile data services. Northwestel is a 50% funding partner in these new infrastructure advancements which will provide over $30 million in technology improvements to the Northwest Territories, says the company.
"Together with Northwestel we are proud to play a major role in the improvement and sustainability of broadband infrastructure and bandwidth capacity for the Northwest Territories,” said Darrell Beaulieu, president and CEO of Falcon Communications (a division of Denendeh Investments). “Late last year we worked together to bring improved broadband services to a number of NWT communities. We are pleased to be able to continue this effort to close the broadband gap by providing even more NWT communities with reliable and affordable internet options.”
