Broadband Communications North(BCN) serves over 50 rural, northern, and remote communities across the province, and they're expanding their services to Pine Creek First Nation and Lake Manitoba First Nation. Executive Director Jason Neepin says this new project is what BCN is all about.
"Broadband Communications North is an Indigenous-owned company. The board of directors is represented by the tribal councils within Manitoba. Our customers are Indigenous, they're the underserved communities in Northern Manitoba. The origin for BCN is through the Schoolnet Programs and the Telehealth Network, and over 20 years it's grown into one of Canada's largest Indigenous broadband networks."
Neepin says that the most important this is to get the best internet possible to remote communities, and they're going to continue working to try and improve the quality of the services they're able to offer.
"A lot of the fiber that we do have to communities is 1 Gigabit Per Second, whereas we would like to see at least 10 Gigabit Per Second. Ideally, we would like to have it like city internet at 100 Gigabit Per Second. So really we're dealing with one percent of the capacity of what the city has. We're making do with what we have, but we would like to be on equal footing."
Neepin says they've taken over the Pine Creek First Nation and Lake Manitoba First Nation projects from Clearsky Connections.
"We’ve taken over operations of their current agreements with Indigenous Services Canada and our expectation is that those two communities will be fully operational by the fall of 2023"
