Barrett Xplore aiming to bring rural Canada online
Published Wednesday October 7th, 2009
MONCTON - Barrett Xplore Inc. is gunning for a large piece of a $225-million federal program to bring Internet to underserved rural Canada.
Out of more than five dozen contract bids due on Oct. 23 for the fund - announced in the federal Conservatives' January budget with the call for applications going out last month - the Woodstock-based Internet service provider is applying for almost all.
"There are 64 and for all intents and purposes we're going after every one of them," said the firm's chairman Bill Barrett in an interview Tuesday.
He said Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia will see the "lion's share" of the projects; New Brunswick and Saskatchewan have their own provincial programs - which Barrett Xplore is delivering locally and in partnership with SaskTel in the Prairie province.
Ottawa has said federal contracts will be awarded by December and the government will fund up to 50 per cent of costs.
"We've worked hard to be in a position to earn the right to provide broadband to rural Canada," Barrett said.
In 2007, Barrett Xplore also won a bid with the City of Ottawa to deliver broadband coverage to the remaining areas in rural Ottawa without the Internet.
The executive, who leads the firm with his brother, Ed Barrett, spoke to a crowd of knowledge sector executives and officials at Moncton's Delta Beauséjour hotel during the first of a two-day technology forum - the Intelligent Communities Summit.
He told the audience the deal that is seeing Barrett Xplore deploy its Xplornet brand to rural New Brunswick positions the firm prominently by "legitimizing" a local company to the country.
The firm received a $10-million loan guarantee from the province in May to fulfill a government contract to bring the Internet to the remaining 10 per cent of New Brunswickers without access, and is expected to finish work by next summer.
The executive said that likely all the big telecommunications firms will apply for the national bids, which means stiff competition for Barrett Xplore.
"We anticipate they're going to be strong aggressive competitors; we're looking forward to it," Barrett said.
The federal government has said key criteria for successful applicants include which firms can provide the best coverage at the lowest cost, create jobs, deliver within a set timeframe and ensure a viable and sustainable future business model.
Barrett Xplore was born in 2005 out of Barrett Corp. and has more than 400 employees.
Barrett said his company has a wireless and satellite solution that allows the firm to deliver Internet to 100 per cent of the country.
"You couple that with the next generation of satellite capability and the capacity demands that customers are going to have and you recognize that a huge part of Canada just is not going to have options beyond the good solutions that come with satellite," he said.
Barrett believes as many as 2.5 million Canadians out of 14 million do not have access to high-speed Internet while only 1.6 million of those without high-speed will have access to satellite service.
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission reported that at the end of 2007, 93 per cent of Canadian households had access to broadband but only 81 per cent of rural homes could get online - compared to nearly all urban homes.
While all households are within the satellite service range, existing satellite capacity can provide service to only one per cent of homes, the commission said.
Barrett Xplore has spent the last two-and-a-half years developing sophisticated mapping software, which, when paired with information from Statistics Canada, allows the company to assess its market opportunity.
"We're going after rural, so we have to identify that customer that isn't presently served and we don't anticipate to be served," Barrett said.
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