Subject: CSS May News
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Cyberspace brings world to Nunavut's doorstep (Canada)
90 percent of house-holds can log on in Iqaluit, perhaps one of the
best-wired cities.
Ruth Walker (walkerr@csps.com)
Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/2000/05/17/p7s1.htm
IQALUIT, NUNAVUT
When you think of "wired communities," what comes to mind? High-tech
hotbeds like Silicon Valley? University towns? Affluent suburban
kids multitasking with Napster and their online term-paper
simultaneously?
Well, sure.
But how about the Canadian Arctic?
With the Internet penetration rate here in Iqaluit at an estimated
90 percent of households, and rates in other communities of the
territory similarly high, Nunavut is supposed to be one of the
best-wired jurisdictions in Canada - maybe in the world.
"Yeah," says Marcel Mason, Web master for Nunanet, the local
Internet service provider (ISP) here in Iqaluit. "And 'supposed to
be' is the operative part of that sentence."
Such is the paradox of Nunavut and the Internet. This place is
wired. It's hard to imagine how it could hold itself together
otherwise. Nunavut has less than 30,000 people sprawled across a
landmass nearly three times the size of Texas.
But the same factors of distance, climate, and sparse population
that make the territory so dependent on the Internet also make it
hard to provide the level of service that this part of the world so
desperately needs.
Speaking of customers who rely on local Internet connections, Mr.
Mason says, "Most people aren't doing anything other than
five-minute burst of checking their e-mail." Nunavut's larger
communities have local ISPs, whose customers connect for the cost of
a local phone call. "But if you live up in Grise Fjord, and you want
to surf the Net, you're going to end up paying a lot to Northwest
Tel."
Frederick Ford, owner of Qamanittuaq Fine Arts in Baker Lake, is an
example of both the possibilities and the limitations of the
Internet in the Arctic. He doesn't sell art online directly. "To have
a Web page would be ridiculous. I'd be online all the time updating
things," he says.
But he takes high-resolution digital photographs of art objects and
e-mails them to potential buyers around the world. These files can
take up to 20 minutes to upload, and his monthly phone bills can
easily exceed $1,000. "I'm paying twice as much as anywhere else in
the country, and I'm getting a quarter of the service," he says.
Part of the problem, he says, is that the Internet is so dominated
by government and educational institutions in the territory, and the
private-sector economy is so small, that "no one else is going to
complain" about poor service.
That should change, though: Broadband wireless, an Internet
consortium, has just won a federal government license to establish a
broadband wireless network across Nunavut and most of Canada. The
new network - called Inukshuk Internet - will consist of land-based
towers or "sites" like those of a cellular telephone network. The
bits and bytes of Internet content will be zapped to a receiving
outdoor antenna. Dean Proctor of Microcell in Montreal, a partner in
the Inukshuk consortium, says the new service will be twice as fast
as average cable-modem transmission today.
"The main thing is that it will bring high-speed, high-bandwidth
Internet service at a reasonable price," says Mr. Itorcheak, who
describes himself as "a modern Inuk - with a harpoon in one hand and
a briefcase in the other." As a teenager during the late 1980s, he
started his career in telecommunications as a technician. "I was the
laziest technician Northwest Tel ever had," he says today. "I didn't
want to install all that wire!" he says. This predisposition
evidently helped convince him that the future was wireless.
Mr. Procter says Nunanet is an ISP that has become "a local
information source." Nunanet's political chat rooms, for instance,
have drawn as many as 30,000 to 35,000 hits a month, with visitors
from as far away as Argentina.
That's the kind of connection that's important in the Nunavut
community of Rankin Inlet. Mervin Tulloch, information and
communications technology coordinator at the Leo Ussak Elementary
School says "Without [the Internet], we'd be kind of stranded in
town, so to speak. But it allows us to talk with schools around the
world. It shows us deserts and mountains that our students have never
seen."
All the schools in Nunavut and the Northwest Territories are online,
but Leo Ussak was the first school in the Far North - "North of 60,"
as the expression goes - to have a Web presence. "We get about 50
e-mails a day from schools around the world," Mr. Tulloch says.
"We've had thousands and thousands of postcards."
The Internet lets the school take virtual field trips to places the
pupils could never visit. "We've talked to the space shuttle [crew]
on two occasions, too," Tulloch says. "It's opened up the world so
that little Rankin Inlet isn't so far away anymore."
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Also in this issue:
- Cyberspace brings world to Nunavut's doorstep (Canada)
90 percent of house-holds can log on in Iqaluit, perhaps one of the
best-wired cities.
- The unknown hackers
Bill and Lynne Jolitz may be the most famous programmers you've
never heard of.
- College Requires Online App (US)
You are just a click away from becoming college student.
Starting this fall, all students applying to West Virginia Wesleyan
College will be required to apply online.
- Bartering Boom (US)
Fledgling businesses preserve cash by swapping services, goods
online Carolyn Said, Chronicle Staff Writer
- Microsoft's 'Clippy' a security nightmare? (US)
Experts question robustness of Windows scripting system -- the
technology behind Office Assistant -- after discovery of a security
hole.
- Computer crimes on the rise in Russia, police official says
MOSCOW (AP) -- The number of computer-related crimes continues to
rise in Russia, with more than 200 cases of hacking reported in the
first three months of the year, a news agency quoted a top police
official as saying Wednesday.
- Future of the Postal Service in the Internet era is uncertain (US)
WASHINGTON (AP) ó The future of the Postal Service in the Internet
era is littered with uncertainties that will eventually make the
agency more like a private company, Postmaster General William
Henderson said Tuesday.
- Rush is on to provide high-speed Net (Canada)
Speed rules on the Internet. It cuts the long waits associated with
surfing the Web, eliminates the need for cumbersome log-ons and
opens the door to actually watching video online.
- Search Engines, Getting Listed: Doing It Right
As pointed out last week, each search engine and directory has
specific requirements when accepting a "request to be listed," and
those requirements are all a little different. It's not
one-size-fits-all. Some things are best done by hand, and you'll
probably find that this is one of them.
- New Lists and Journals
* NEW: TheKidzKingdom
* NEW: Thebes Digest
* NEW: The Zone Daily 'File
On-line Learning Series of Courses
http://www.bestnet.org/~jwalker/course.htm
Member: Association for International Business
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