A Rural Broadband Partnership Program was announced recently by SaskTel. The new initiative that will see SaskTel partner with internet providers to bring advanced broadband connectivity to underserved farms, acreages, Indigenous communities and other hard-to-serve rural areas in Saskatchewan.

"We invest hundreds of millions of dollars in our networks every year, and we invest more than any other communications provider in the province," said SaskTel Spokesperson Greg Jacob. "We recognize that our investments alone won't get us to every single household in Saskatchewan, which is why we're launching this program to see if we can work with other providers to get that last mile connectivity to more Saskatchewan residents."

Jacob explained how the program works.

"The partner organizations we're working with, a good example is Wood River Controls, they will put up some equipments on an existing piece of infrastructure that we have, and then provide wireless broadband services to a region, community, or what not," he noted.

"At the end of the day, like the end customer technically is working with our partner, they're not interfacing with SaskTel. We're in the background of this relationship. We're just simply enabling these other providers to expand their networks to areas that we couldn't reach by ourselves."

With the province's largest wireline and wireless networks, SaskTel currently delivers broadband speeds that meet or exceed the CRTC's 50/10 benchmark (50 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload) to 85% of the population of the province. Through this partnership program, SaskTel will work with internet providers to expand their coverage areas with the specific aim to bring 50/10 unlimited broadband service, or better, to more Saskatchewan households.

SaskTel has received strong interest in the Rural Broadband Partnership Program from several local rural internet providers, with H and K Rural Networks Inc, Living Sky Internet, and Wood River Controls currently signed on. Additionally, as the first provider to partner with SaskTel, Wood River Controls has already utilized the program to bring broadband service to the Last Mountain Lake area, the Muscowpetung First Nation and is also working on a project near Lake Diefenbaker.