CALGARY—An isolated native-Indian community has obtained its first solid link—without wires—to the outside world. Quick Link Communications of Calgary, a satellite services provider, has connected the Wasagamack community to wireless technology.
Wasagamack is a First Nations community located about 100 kilometers from the nearest landline high-speed network. Quick Link’s solution combines satellite and wireless technologies to connect the community’s administration and education facilities to the Internet. The wireless network uses routers to link with a satellite ground station. The base station, in turn, connects with a satellite 37,000 kilometers up in the air to beam the signals to Quick Link in Calgary.
So far, the company has connected a handful of isolated native communities in Canada, in Quebec, Manitoba and the Northwest Territories, by integrating satellite, caching and point-to-multipoint technology. The end-to-end connections are usually at speeds of 56 to 256 kilobits per second (kbps).
