Canadian Province Embarks on Largest Wireless Mesh Deployment in Country

July 26, 2007

by David Barry

It happens every day: cities and municipalities worldwide make infrastructure-enhancing investment decisions--from building a state-of-the-art library to renovating a downtown section to building a free WiFi Internet network--in a continuous quest to make their cities and towns more attractive and desirable.

The province of Saskatchewan, Canada, a 660,000 square kilometer region, has added a new dimension to this trend: it is now unveiling the largest outdoor wireless mesh Internet access network in Canada, offering free WiFi to the province's four largest cities. Known as the Saskatchewan! Connected initiative, the WiFi networks will provide free wireless service to visitors, residents, students and businesses in the downtown business districts and post-secondary campuses of the province's largest cities of Moose Jaw, Prince Albert, Regina, and Saskatoon.

One of the province's primary motivations, according to Frank Quennell, Saskatchewan's Minister Responsible for Information Technology, was to entice more technologically savvy young people to pursue their education and build their careers in Saskatchewan. Recently, the province has noticed an increase of in-migration as people choose to escape the growing congestion and high cost of living in Alberta for the short commute times and affordable housing in Saskatchewan. State-of-the-art technology has the potential to be another powerful inducement, as the province learned when it held a Youth Summit in February 2007 to solicit ideas from young people about how to create a more stimulating living environment.

"The creative use of technologies was one of the most compelling ideas suggested by young people at the Summit," says Quennell. " WiFi was tremendously popular. Young people at the conference were asking not only about laptop WiFi connectivity, but about WiFi phones, WiFi music devices and even newer satellite radio devices that can work over WiFi if satellite connectivity was down."

"Soon after the Summit, we gave approval to proceed as part of our ongoing commitment to the use of technology to enhance the quality of life in Saskatchewan."

Government Moving at the Speed of Business

Beyond the size of the WiFi deployment, the other unique quality of the Saskatchewan! Connected initiative was how quickly the government moved from a flurry of ideas to deployment. Governments are notoriously slow in rolling out any new initiative, especially one that is technology based--often taking years to first embrace an idea, gain consensus, then design, and finally deploy a novel technology.

The Saskatchewan Youth Summit was held in February, 2007. The province has now completed rollout of the service less than six months after the idea was first suggested and only 3 months after the go decision was made.

"We are essentially doing a 3-year project in 3 months," says Richard Murray, Executive Director of Policy and Planning with the government's Information Technology Office (ITO).

"The reason that Saskatchewan can move so fast is that it is the only province that has continued to hold on to its incumbent telecom company, SaskTel, rather than spinning it off as other provinces have done," says Lawrence Surtees, vice-president & principal analyst, Communications Research at IDC Canada Ltd. "The advantage is that Saskatchewan uses SaskTel as an instrument of policy and economic development so it can undertake this massive free WiFi deployment based only on the province's best policy interests--and to do so quickly because of its close collaboration between the government and the telecom provider."

As part of the deployment, Saskatchewan is deploying 250 Cisco Aironet 1500 wireless access points (WAPs) in the downtown sections of the four cites, approximately one per city block. According to Murray, the province has been able to install the WAPs much more quickly than they had anticipated.

"We were cautious as nobody had done this before, mounting them on city-owned telephone poles," says Murray. "We estimated an install time of two to three hours per pole, but we were able to do it in 45 minutes per pole. In one day we had mounted all the units on Regina's main downtown street, Victoria Avenue."

Not only does Saskatchewan anticipate the WiFi networks being used by each town's residents, visitors, business people and the universities, it is also receiving other types of inquiries. For example, a collaborative research project between the National Research Council Centre for Sustainable Infrastructure Research (NRC-CSIR), the University of Regina Faculty of Engineering, and the City of Regina, is currently investigating the use of the Saskatchewan! Connected network to develop applications for real-time wireless monitoring of municipal infrastructure systems.

"What we continually learn when we lay out infrastructure, whether the free WiFi now or the fiber optic infrastructure we've laid out over the last 10 years, is that if you deploy it, people will find new and innovative ways to use it," says Murray.

Don Wincherauk, Deputy Minister of the ITO notes that "We provided broadband Internet access to all the schools in our province a few years ago and the usage of the Internet by the schools has been staggering. Time will tell, but I'm convinced that creative uses of the WiFi networks will be just as explosive as we've seen with our other leading-edge network innovations."

David Barry is a freelance journalist located in Princeton, NJ.