Run out of town --

The Low Down to Hull and Back headline "Wakenet, a local Internet company, is being run out of town --" got my attention. I'm an avid supporter of Wakenet and the valuable service they provide in providing high speed to people who can work from home. My house was "triangulated" by two of the nicest guys who easily persuaded me to beam a signal to people near-by who were shut out for high speed internet. I've been helping people work from home (like myself) and getting free high speed internet for over five years now. Don't get me wrong, I'm no internet junkie and no flunky when it comes to understanding what it's all about. I'm not a full-blown Luddite, but I'm skeptical of embracing too much technology, too quickly and without adequate redundancy. And then there's those bloody towers everywhere, don't get me going on that! So I thought I'd include this letter of the day to demonstrate the logic of having a local response to a problem be considered over the dubious might of Quebec trumped up companies like Xittel. Let's keep the choice ours and slow those techno wheels down a tad eh?



Letter of the week:


On March 2, 2012 Rapide-O-Web (run by La Pêche and Vals-Des-Monts; President
is Mayor Bussière) published a request for proposal (RFP) to spend $1.3 million on high speed
in La Pêche. Wakenet is a non-profit organization which has been providing high speed
Internet since 2004.

We were shocked to find out that they designed the RFP such that we can't
bid on it! The RFP targets large corporations.  GIVING all of this money to a large
company (such as Xittel) to build towers here will likely put us out of business.

If only the problem was that "simple": In the RFP, Rapide-O-Web has asked
bidders to build towers in the areas already covered by Wakenet!  It gets worse:
Rapide-O-Web is also asking bidders to build towers in Edelweiss and other areas already covered by
Bell-DSL! And this is almost 2 years after they made a public announcement (posted on
the La Pêche website) that "Bell DSL was soon coming to the Edelweiss area".
What??!

Tax payers take note: A whopping 44% of the homes targeted in the RFP for La
Pêche already have Bell-DSL. This is over 1/2 million dollars of your tax money being
wasted!

We, at Wakenet, are making an appeal for justice and transparency with
regards to this RFP. If this plan goes through, it will not only be an enormous waste of public
funds, but will also unfairly threaten a local organization.  We have worked very
hard for the past 8 years to provide high speed Internet to rural areas around
Wakefield (we cover about 1/3 of La Pêche, in area), and we did it without receiving
one single cent of government funding!

To find out more, and to support Wakenet: http://justice.wakenet.ca