SaskTel is in the midst of a multimillion-dollar upgrade designed to accelerate sluggish internet speeds in Creighton and across northeastern Saskatchewan.
Michelle Englot, spokeswoman for the communications provider, said the company has nearly completed a fibre optics line between La Ronge and Points North.
The line is the main component of SaskTel’s rebuild of the backhaul network that services northeastern Saskatchewan, Saskatchewan, including Creighton and area, she said.
“Over the past two winters we have constructed a significant portion of the line and this winter we expect to complete it,” said Englot.
She said the line carries a price tag of about $30 million.
SaskTel is also reinforcing its radio backhaul network to carry community traffic from Creighton and area, and other communities, to the new fibre optics line, Englot said.
Those upgrades will conclude at an undetermined point in 2016, she said, “resolving the network congestion” that has frustrated many Creighton subscribers.
The radio backhaul network upgrades, combined with improvements to some community infrastructure in the region, will cost nearly $10 million this year, Englot said.
Creighton internet subscribers can currently access SaskTel’s High Speed Basic package, which promises “up to” 1.5 megabits per second (Mbps).
However, Creighton subscribers have told The Reminder that actual speeds tend to be much lower, particularly during times of heavy usage or when using a streaming service such as Netflix.
Creighton town council has frequently heard complaints about the service. The latest example came last month when Creighton resident Dianne Christianson forwarded council a copy of a message she sent to SaskTel.
“Creighton has the slowest high speed internet service that SaskTel offers,” she wrote.
“We want high speed internet services on par with the rest of our province. We continue to pay for services we do not receive. I am requesting a reimbursement of my monthly high speed internet fees [going] back months and months as I never received high speed service promised.”
Referencing the letter, Mayor Bruce Fidler made mention of “the normal concerns that pretty much everybody in town has regarding the SaskTel internet service.”
SaskTel is aware of such complaints. Englot said the growth of new applications and services over the internet has rapidly eaten into the amount of bandwidth customers use.
“Over the past year alone, the growth in wireless bandwidth by our customers has been over 25 per cent while wireline bandwidth usage has increased at a similar rate,” she said. “The increased demands of our customers for both wireless and wireline bandwidth has created congestion on the backhaul network that services the northeast region of Saskatchewan, including Creighton and area.”
