Living in the middle of nowhere doesn't have to feel like you're living in the middle of nowhere anymore.

With the surge of Internet service to rural Manitoba and Saskatchewan, living in the country can look just like living in the city - minus the commute.

Pinawa, Man., a town of 1,500 people 115 kilometres northeast of Winnipeg, was once a single-industry community built around an Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. (AECL) research centre. The sudden closure of the facility in 1991 threatened the town's existence, but thanks to technology, Pinawa is now a thriving business centre.

"A lot of the housing (after AECL closed) got bought up by retirees," says Blair Skinner, Pinawa's deputy mayor. "But we don't feel the town is going to be sustainable in the long run just being a retirement community ... we need a more balanced demographic."

Photo courtesy of Pinawa Community Development Corp.
Granite Internet Services Inc. president Donna Warenko enjoys wireless access by the lake.

Attracting younger people to rural life might once have been difficult, but Pinawa has the answer. "We have a beautiful community to market," says Skinner, "but young families aren't going to move here just because it's beautiful. They're going to need to be able to work too."

How can they do that? Using wireless high-speed Internet.

"We have businesses that have not relocated to the city because of this access," says Donna Warenko, president of Granite Internet Services Inc., the Pinawa-based company providing the service. "We also know that we have some residents that have made their cottages their home ... they can now live at the cottage because they can work at the cottage."

Granite launched its wireless broadband technology in 2003 and now offers it in Pinawa, Seven Sisters, parts of the R.M. of Whitemouth, areas in the R.M. of Lac du Bonnet and a 12- to 15-mile region extending from the Pine Falls Hydro Dam.

The "line-of-sight" wireless service Granite provides requires line-of-sight from a user's home or office to an access point on a tower.

"We co-locate on several towers," says Warenko. "Some cell towers, some Manitoba Hydro towers, even a Bell Canada tower's in the works for us. And sometimes we even build our own."

She explains the Internet is fed wirelessly to an access point on a tower, and is then redistributed. A subscriber, who can be up to 15 or 20 miles away from the access point, has to install a module, which may look like a satellite dish, an antenna or "just a little unit," at their home or business, and point the module to the access point on the tower. Costs start at $39.95 per month.

"Manitoba has MTS Allstream which is high speed in towns," she explains. "But because they offer a service called DSL (digital subscriber line, a high-speed service that uses telephone lines), it's limited to running within three to five kilometres of a telephone switch (equipment in a central location that connects phone calls). And so it just simply does not reach rural areas."

Granite's success, Warenko adds, could not have been achieved without the towns' involvement. "Pinawa built me a tower, which I now lease back, and eventually I will pay for it. But I couldn't have done it without that tower."

She also says Granite is now expanding coverage using grant money that is a combination of federal funds and a per capita buy-in from each municipality that will receive service.

Pinawa Mayor Len Simpson says the payback of Internet capability in the town has only just begun. "We've got around 50 to 75 what you might call home-based entrepreneurs, and some of them have actually set up offices here as well. We call that our technology cluster, and we want to grow on that."

The companies, he says, are mostly technical, such as software development or environmental research, and all require the use of the Internet.

But with the high-speed connections Pinawa can offer, Simpson says people seem more than ready to get away from an "undesirable urban environment with crime and smoke" and move to Pinawa's natural environment with water and forests.

He says even though the town has not yet launched its full marketing campaign to attract young entrepreneurs, the town is already getting inquiries from inside the province and as far away as Scotland.

"This town was originally designed for 5,000 people," Simpson says. "So we're getting ready" for the growth.

Granite's original five-year plan was to cover northeast Manitoba with high-speed, but Warenko says the company is ahead of schedule. "We should complete that by this summer, and it only took us three years."

Where do they go from here?

"Our company's plans for the future are to be able to provide all of rural Manitoba with high-speed Internet, and probably a little bit of northwestern Ontario as well because we're already sort of close to that area," says Warenko.

She adds: "We just drove through Saskatchewan last week ... (and) I kept thinking: 'Boy, I'd like to do business here. There are hardly any trees.' ... I bet you could get a 40-mile range in Saskatchewan."

iNET2000.com offers wireless high-speed to rural Saskatchewan from $29.99 per month, and its line-of-sight service can reach up to 40 km. The company, which has been providing Internet services since 1997, implemented high-speed services in 1999 in the Prince Albert area and has been expanding ever since.

Without government or municipal funding, iNET2000 has a different approach to placing its access points.

"We call it a friends in high places program," says Rob Worobetz, a manager in the company. "If we have a friend in a high place, a person with a grain elevator, for instance, and they would like to partner up with us, then we would exchange services for their building."

This program helps reduce everyone's costs, he says, although the company has built its own towers in certain instances.

Wireless high-speed providers in Saskatchewan face more competition than their counterparts in Manitoba. "There would be three other competitors (offering line-of-sight) in our given area here, including the telco (SaskTel)," says Worobetz.

But his company is proud of going where no wireless has gone before. "There's nobody else competing with us (in villages like Albertville, 25 km northeast of Prince Albert)," he says. "That's because we've made the effort to actually get there, where some of our other competitors ... just have never really bothered to do it."

Worobetz explains that in spite of competition, there is a large untapped market in Saskatchewan. "(SaskTel's) wired coverage is limited to people who have some sort of a major service."

He says towns with RCMP or a hospital service will get a wired connection from SaskTel, and then people in a 2.5-km radius can hook up.

"But everybody else that's outside of that radius can't," Worobetz adds. "So the value to us is that there are literally thousands of potential customers that we can reach with these (wireless) services."

Why would a farmer in a tiny village want access?

"Everyone wants high speed," says Worobetz. The biggest request from customers, he says, is to get access to the Internet, but get it off their phone line.

"More and more services, like banking and medical, are kind of expecting people to have some sort of way of talking to them while they're using their Internet connection."

Lots of people, he says, are missing calls because they're surfing. Or kids who want the Internet for schoolwork can't get online because someone in the family is expecting an important call.

But the other desire, says Worobetz, is a faster connection. He says people who may have access to a high-speed connection at work are no longer satisfied with dial-up at home.

"If it takes you 15 minutes to do something at work and it takes you two hours to do the same thing at home, it's frustrating."

From $54.99 per month, iNET2000 also offers high-speed Internet via satellite. "Our line of sight (covers) 2,000 square miles" of Saskatchewan, says Worobetz. But satellite coverage will work anywhere in the province, "unless you're in a bunker some place a hundred feet under the ground.

"We started very small," Worobetz says of his company, but have since grown "exponentially" to thousands of customers.

Skinner says with technology like what Pinawa has to offer, small town life can continue to grow.

"The response to what we've done so far has been excellent," Skinner notes. "Our marketing strategy is aimed at attracting young people, but we fully expect it will attract anybody."

(Nicole Strandlund can be reached at nicole@businessedge.ca)