By Ruby Pratka
IN 2018, AS CO-OPERATIVE insurance company MyMutual celebrated more than a century of providing farm, home and business insurance to rural Saskatchewan customers, the company’s leadership was faced with a stark choice.
The Internet speed available in Waldheim, Sask., a town of just over 1,000 people where MyMutual had been based since its inception, was no longer keeping up with the company’s needs. The company could either move a 40 minute drive south to Saskatoon, taking its rural roots and more than 30 jobs with it, or stay in Waldheim and come up with another solution.
MyMutual chose the latter, teaming up with Redbird Communications, a Saskatoon-based independent ISP, and the Town of Waldheim, to not only bring fibre to MyMutual’s headquarters, but also make it available to homes and businesses throughout Waldheim (pictured above is fibre being trenched to the town).
Robin Seaborn, president of Redbird Communications, says the three-way partnership — between an ISP, a municipality and a major employer – is the first of its kind in Saskatchewan, and he hopes it won’t be the last. “We’re really hoping to repeat this if we can find a key [business] player in every town,” he says.
Seaborn explains that small-town Saskatchewan has been historically underserved by large providers (where the provincial Crown Corporation SaskTel is dominant). “It comes down to size – Saskatchewan is a big province, it has a sparse population, and there are so many kilometres to build, so that drives up the cost,” he says.
MyMutual “came to us with a very specific question about what we could do to fix the [situation] in Waldheim,” Seaborn recalls. Seaborn and his colleague, Robert Kinlock, proposed connecting Waldheim with an existing fibre optic line in nearby Rosthern.
“MyMutual wanted to keep their workforce in town but couldn’t do that anymore without better connectivity,” says Seaborn. “We thought that if we could bring [connectivity] to MyMutual, why couldn’t we do it for the whole town?” Although there were some “permit issues” involving digging in the vicinity of a railroad track that briefly held up the project, Seaborn says the actual laying and connecting of cable went smoothly despite the short Saskatchewan construction season.
Sheldon Hildebrand is the deputy mayor of Waldheim and a member of the town council. A self-described technology geek, he stepped forward to be the town’s point person on connectivity. “MyMutual was not happy with the Internet they were getting, and they came to us in February 2019,” he says. “We hammered out an agreement to make it happen with Redbird and to take on some of the costs. MyMutual and the town office were connected just before Christmas, and the first homes were connected this spring.” He adds that the minimum speed for Redbird fibre customers, 25 Mbps, was the previous maximum speed.
Riding the digital wave
“Now that the whole industry is going digital, we couldn’t afford not to have that infrastructure,” says Chris Enns, a member of MyMutual’s three-person leadership team. “We couldn’t work on the DSL lines that we had and continue to serve our customers.”
Sheldon Hildebrand
He says companies across the province which choose to remain in small towns have similar problems. “Rural Saskatchewan suffers from a lack of competition, and there’s no money to be made by a large telecom serving a rural community of 1,200 people — there’s no return on their investment. That leaves a lot of rural Saskatchewan companies hamstrung. In our case, we consulted with SaskTel about service improvements and we were told there was no upgrade coming. We had to decide whether to wait or to take the initiative and do something different – the timing was kind of forced on us.”
“This problem first came up a couple of years ago, when we built a new building, we couldn’t get broadband and we were looking at what other communities had done to bring in their own [broadband],” said Enns. “Instead of building our own network, we partnered with Redbird, and the town also contributed financially. Now we have a one-gigabyte connection up and down, and it’s fantastic. Customers [who are making an insurance claim] can send us photos and videos, for example, and we can connect with them better.”
As the Covid-19 pandemic hit and people began working from home, all three partners were grateful for the availability of in-home high-speed Internet. “Employees who were trying to do their jobs remotely had major problems before, and now they don’t,” says Enns.
High-speed Internet “has changed things more than we thought,” says Seaborn. “With Covid, everyone is pushing to work from home, and now people can make medical appointments online and do video calls, and everything works much better.”
Hildebrand, the deputy mayor, hopes that expanding access to high-speed Internet won’t just keep people and jobs in Waldheim, but will eventually serve as a draw.
“The pandemic has highlighted the need for fast Internet access, especially for people working from home,” says Hildebrand, the city councillor. “We’re hoping that [high-speed Internet] will be just another attraction, another reason for people to come live and work here.”
