Efforts to give residents of Kaniva and surrounds a new fixed wireless internet service are gathering momentum.
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Jordi Rosenfield, director of Commsearch, said the company was approaching individuals and businesses after the company Hyperwave agreed to build its network.
"We've had about 50 people fill out expressions of interest via web form, and we are in the process of contacting a few of those to set them up," he said.
"The entities we are approaching are the likes of West Wimmera Shire Council's Kaniva offices, Luv-a-Duck near Nhill, and a couple of well-networked people we've met along the way that can assist us."
Unlike most Wimmera towns, Kaniva only has access to the NBN via satellite technology known as Sky Muster, which became available in April 2016. But this delivers slower upload and download rates than fixed wireless internet.
Fixed wireless internet works with infrastructure such as towers transmitting data over radio signals to equipment at each individual premises.
Mr Rosenfield said equipment to provide the service had been installed on silos at Nhill, Kaniva's GWMWater tower and private properties.
"Sky Muster can give you certain speeds in terms of uploading and downloading, but it also means when you press enter on your keyboard to go to a website, it's going to take a certain amount of time for that signal to go from your premises to the satellite and then come back down to where it needs to. NBN fixed wireless is better than NBN satellite for that reason," he said.
"Wherever we have equipment installed, we have a 30-kilometre radius we can hit."
Mr Rosenfield said residents interested in connecting could visit the Facebook page called Wimmera Broadband.
"From a technological sense, there is no reason this isn't going to be as successful as we want it to be, and we will consider expanding to other areas if we have enough numbers. Once we do, we could get another wholesale connection out of GWMWater tower in Warracknabeal, and what you're doing then is building redundancy in the network which means if one goes down the other one holds it, so you're building a much more robust network. That's where we want to be in time."
Lillimur farmer Simon Goodwin, owner of interstate trucking company Goodwin Freight Services, said he would "absolutely" want to be part of a new fixed wireless network.
"At our house in town, we have two ADSL connections just so it's fast enough for my family and I that use various streaming services," he said. "I did have Sky Muster as a back-up until last year, but I found every time we needed to use it because Telstra's network was down it didn't work. I asked NBN about it a couple of times and they said it was a generalised outage."
ADSL involves internet being delivered over the same copper-wiring used for landline phones.
This option is progressively being switched off across Australia, however the copper network within NBN Fixed Wireless and Sky Muster areas will not be switched off.
Mr Goodwin said his freight company employed 35 people, and also had offices in Adelaide and Melbourne where he was hiring new staff.
"We recently put on a bookkeeper in our Melbourne depot simply because the internet is faster there than at Lillimur," he said.
"We use a lot of cloud-based software and the ability to be live online with all of our staff is really important. We have had to travel to meet clients face-to-face because the internet is not good enough for us to use video conferencing."
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