RALEIGH/ST. LUNAIRE-GRIQUET, N.L. — St. Anthony Basin Resources Inc (SABRI) is hopeful a project to expand cellular service across the tip of the Northern Peninsula will be complete by the end of the year.
On Oct. 8, the organization, who is partnering with Bell Mobility and the Government of NL on the project, was granted approval from Crown Lands to install an 80-metre Long-Term Evolution (LTE) tower installed in Raleigh at Ha Ha Mountain and a SimpleCell pole in St. Lunaire-Griquet installed at the top of St. Brendan’s Trail.
They had been waiting for approval since $1.5 million funding was announced for the project in July 2018.
The towers will bring High Speed Packet Access and LTE mobile technologies to approximately 4,000 residents from St. Anthony Airport to Goose Cove East.
St. Lunaire-Griquet, L’Anse aux Meadows, Raleigh, Ship Cove, Cook’s Harbour and many other communities will now be serviced.
The target date for installation was Dec 2019 and while approval took longer than expected, SABRI believes things should be back on track.
SABRI executive director Sam Elliott told The Northern Pen he was hopeful the towers would be up and running by December.
“We’re optimistic it’s going to get done,” he said. “Anything can happen, but the idea was we would get cell coverage by the end of the year and hopefully that’s going to come to fruition.”
The contract has been awarded to Westower Communications.
Work is underway with the contractor constructing roads to the sites where the towers will be installed.
The project is cost shared with Bell Mobility contributing over $720,000 while SABRI and the province are each contributing approximately $360,000.
