The connection many Bragg Creek residents have been longing for has arrived – internet connection, that is.
Thanks to an Alberta-born technology that provides the hamlet with high-speed internet, residents of Bragg Creek are finally able to upload, download and connect online to their heart’s content.
Dr. Sayed-Amr “Sisso” El-Hamamsy, the CEO of Mage Networks – the company responsible for the technology and expansion of internet connectivity in the hamlet – said the company’s mission is to “connect everyone, everywhere.”
“What we’re offering and how we’re offering it is truly a game-changer in a global sense,” he said.
At the moment, Mage is working to expand its network system out to West Bragg Creek and the Wintergreen area, where residents are anxiously awaiting the technology's arrival.
“The customers who have it love it. The customers who don’t are yelling at us to get there,” El-Hamamsy said with a laugh.
Decent internet service has been hard to come by in the hamlet, due to its isolated, tree-covered location and lack of established cell towers in the area. Residents are currently using satellite services and wi-fi hotspots they’ve purchased with hopes that the boost will be enough, but the connection is still less than sufficient, according to El-Hamamsy.
“The performance of those two services is very poor,” he said.
An area resident who could attest to that is Chris Beck, a wedding photographer who lives in west Bragg Creek. He and his wife moved to the area about four years ago, and Beck said that available internet services were very influential when they were choosing a home to purchase.
He said they ultimately chose their home due to the house's ability to hook up a Telus Hub, which – according to the company’s website – is a device connected to an LTE network designed to bring high-speed access to rural communities.
“There were certain areas [in Bragg Creek] we felt we definitely could not go to as opposed to other ones,” he said.
After struggling to get a connection and being on the phone with the company's customer support representatives on and off for 10 days, Beck said he was finally able to secure a connection following his purchase of a Hub. He said his frustrations were a common experience for other people in his neighborhood as well – the company would advertise internet access through the Hub as available in Bragg Creek, but residents would be left having to wrestle with customer service to actually get it up and running, according to Beck.
In the beginning, he says, he was quite pleased with the access he was able to get – 25 megabytes per second for uploads and 25 megabytes per second for downloads.
Even prior to work-from-home orders implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic, Beck said he worked from home for his business, Chinook Photography. Beck said he photographs approximately 65 weddings a year, leaving him with a lot of files to upload, edit, export and send to clients.
“Uploading is important to me as a photographer – I’ve got to send my photos [through] the web,” Beck explained.
As the popularity of the Hub increased in the community, Beck said the service became slower and less reliable.
“Friday night, everybody would come home from work and the system would be bogged down. And you would drop to – maybe, if you were lucky – one and a half megabytes download, 0.9 max at the upload – I couldn’t do anything with those stats,” he recalled.
Beck had also reached the maximum monthly usage of 500 megabytes and therefore, no longer had a connection to use for work or play. He then made the decision to purchase a second Hub.
Even with his second device, Beck said the lagging connection became a constant frustration. He said he would often have to reboot his Hub no less than three or four times a day, just to see if he could get a better signal.
“I would have to upload photos to clients, and sometimes it would take three or four days,” he said, “and during that time, we couldn’t do anything else [online] in the house.”
The experiences of Beck and many other Bragg Creek residents are what led to solutions like Mage Networks’ new technology to be explored.
The current set-up in Bragg Creek has very high ping rates, El-Hamamsy explained, which refers to the length of time it takes for a server to come back with a result after someone submits a request. For example, he said this could be how long it takes to process the results of a Google search or the amount of time it takes for a Netflix film to begin streaming after a click.
High ping rates make it impossible to use any kind of video-conferencing systems like Zoom, El-Hamamsy said, which has become an essential tool due to the increase in individuals working from home during the pandemic.
Mage’s technology is considered a hybrid, as it uses both wireless and fibre connections to ensure residents living in smaller or sparsely occupied areas don’t pay for and rely on inadequate towers.
“In areas like Bragg Creek or other areas in the plains, the towers are not capable of satisfying the needs of the customer,” El-Hamamsy said. “You either have to buy way more towers than you can afford, or you just don’t reach certain customers, or you reach them at very poor performance.”
El-Hamamsy described what Mage call its ‘multi-hop’ approach, in which devices called relays – almost like miniature towers – are installed around the area to allow information to be passed from one relay to the next. He said that a very high data rate is maintained across multiple hops, so that even people 10 to 15 kilometres away will have the ability to access the connection.
“The reason the relays work well is, if there is an obstacle like a hill or if there’s a loss of signal strength because of trees or just distance, we just put more relays,” he said.
This approach is very cost-effective, according to El-Hamamsy, because the relays themselves are inexpensive and are easily hidden in necessary areas. He added that even though he knows where the relays have been placed, he often forgets where they are because they’re not visible.
The installation in Wintergreen and West Bragg Creek will see customers with upload and download speeds of 100 megabytes per second – significantly faster than the one megabyte per second that was often available before.
El-Hamamsy added the technology is innovative and unique, and he hopes remote or rural communities that struggle with their internet connectivity will consider implementing his company’s approach. He added Mage Networks is looking forward to connecting the entire hamlet of Bragg Creek to fast, reliable and accessible internet, and there are also plans to connect the nearby townsite of Redwood Meadows.
