For most Canadian businesses, municipalities, schools and homes, broadband Internet is as common as electricity. But for the 460 residents of Fort Severn - Ontario's most northern community - the technical and financial barriers seemed prohibitive.

That was until the Communications Research Centre partnered with Telesat Canada in 2000 to install and test four satellite sites on behalf of K-Net, an Industry Canada-funded Aboriginal SMART Community. CRC staff also trained and mentored local personnel on how hybrid satellite networks are installed and maintained.

Today, as a result of that pioneering work, K-Net is providing leading-edge telecommunication infrastructure and application support to over 70 First Nations and Inuit communities in Ontario, northern Quebec and northern Manitoba.

It was a similar experience for OmniGlobe Networks Inc. The Montreal-based company, which provides satellite and wireless broadband services to regions of the world where terrestrial telecommunications are unavailable, expensive or unreliable, is currently deploying cellular phone service to northern Canada using a satellite backhaul technology developed in partnership with CRC.

It's a story that has been repeated across northern Canada, including the Arctic, which is a key focal point in the government's efforts to strengthen Canadian sovereignty, protect the region's environmental heritage, promote economic and social development, and improve and devolve governance.

Having an advanced communications infrastructure in place is critical to achieving these goals. And, while satellite is the only practical alternative for reaching remote northern communities, the bandwidth is expensive and technical hurdles can be significant. It takes highly specialized technicians to make these applications work on a satellite system and to integrate the satellite delivery with a terrestrial network located elsewhere in Canada.

Fortunately, Canada has CRC - one of the few clusters of national expertise in satellite communications.

"CRC steps in where there is no business case for private companies," explains Claude Bélisle, Vice-President of CRC's Satellite Communications and Radio Propagation Research Branch. "We are a national resource that is available to other government departments, and to industry and the academic community, to test new hardware or to prove whether a network design concept will work with the application they have in mind."

Delivering tele-health, tele-education or other applications in northern regions is a complex undertaking. Extreme cold, power availability and repairs time are a few of the issues installation crew are facing. However, satallite service is often the only means to connect the northern regions to the south.

As Christopher Iles, Supervisor of Network Systems Integration for the satcom branch, explains, it's also not practical for a partner to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a spectrum analyzer, signal generator and other test equipment to find out if their application will work.

"That's where we come in. We have the equipment. We have the expertise and we have a fairly good idea of what will work and what won't because we've dealing with satcom for so long," says Iles.

CRC also finds ways to minimize satellite costs by maximizing bandwidth usage. Rather than using an entire satellite channel to provide a service that takes up only a fraction of the available capacity, CRC works with partners to bundle several applications onto the same pipe.

"If Health Canada is providing a tele-health service, CRC can help them block the bandwidth they need during the day. Then we can go to Natural Resources Canada, for example, and have them transfer mining data down south at night," says Iles. "With satellite bandwidth, you pay for it whether you use it or not, so our goal is to ensure the most efficient use of that bandwidth."

For more information on how your department, organization or company can partner with CRC, please contact CRC Project Manager Jim Hamilton at (613) 998-2717. Additional information on CRC's satcom programs can be found at:

http://crc.ca/en/html/crc/home/research/satcom/major_satcom