Construction is underway on a project to connect 18,600 homes on Manitoulin Island and along the north shore of Lake Huron to high-speed broadband internet.
ROCK Networks received $97 million in funding from both the federal and provincial governments to help build the network, which will provide fibre-to-the-home connections with download speeds of up to 1.5 gigabits per second.
Joe Hickey, the company’s founder and president, said those speeds are around 3,000 times faster than the 5-megabit-per-second speeds currently available to most homes in the area.
Once the network is built, internet service providers like Indigenous-owned FirstTel will be able to offer their own services using the infrastructure.
Hickey said he expects the costs will vary based on available packages, but the top speeds will likely be less than the $150 a month for a satellite internet connection with Starlink.
Beyond connecting more homes to high-speed internet, Hickey said the network will help economic development in the region.
“During the physical construction itself we’ve got work crews that, you know, some of which are transported into the community,” he said. “So they rent hotels, they have meals.”
Hickey said once the network is built, local internet service providers will also need to hire more people to offer their services.
Hickey added that having access to high-speed internet also makes it possible for people who can work remotely to settle in the area.
“So the attractiveness of northern Ontario in terms of its natural beauty, housing prices, value for home versus land price, quality of schools, that kind of attractiveness we believe will convince people to move to this area,” he said.
Hickey said he expects the network will have its first customers by early 2025.
The Ontario government has a goal to connect everyone in the province to high-speed internet by the end of 2025.
The federal goal is to have 98 per cent of Canadians connected by the end of 2026 and for everyone to have access to at least 50 megabit-per-second download speeds and 10-megabit-per-second upload speeds by the end of 2030.
