My grandmother, born Natalia Potjahailo and known after she was married as Nettie Rukavina, was born in Fort William, Ontario in 1915. As a child she played in a mandolin orchestra; here she is, sitting beside her cousin Stella at the left end of the first row, in an undated photo from that time:

Many years later, at 80 years old, she was still playing the mandolin. In 1995 my brothers and I gave our parents a large glass jar containing sand from the four corner of the country we then called home (our sand came from Victoria, PEI, gathered on the car right off the Island toward Ontario). My brother Steve captured the preparation and unveiling of that present in video, and he used a duet of my father on guitar and my grandmother on mandolin as the soundtrack

After three days of rain, giant mushrooms suddenly sprout on Prince Street just up the street from our house.

Because I found it so difficult to get information about the so-called “PEI Plan” from Bell Aliant, here’s a brief synopsis of what you need to know if you’re interested in taking advantage of it yourself. I wish Bell Aliant or the Province of PEI documented the details themselves somewhere; for now, apparently, the details are in an internal Bell Aliant document that employees cannot release to the public.

1. The plan is in place as a “stop-gap” measure for rural Islanders who live at addresses not yet served by Bell Aliant’s wired Internet. So, to be eligible, you need to establish that your address isn’t eligible for wired Internet. You should be able to find this out on the High Speed Availability Check page on the Bell Aliant website, but there might be an additional “check with engineering” when you request the service to double-check this.
2. There’s no cost for the hardware: Bell Aliant provides a Novatel MiFi 2732 as part of the plan (you must return the device if you cancel service).
3. No long-term contract is required. You must give 30 days notice to cancel service.
4. There’s a $35 one-time sign-up fee.
5. If you’re not already a Bell Aliant customer for other services, they’ll do a credit check before approving you for service. You’ll be asked to provide your date of birth and one of your SIN number or a credit card number. The credit check happens quite quickly.
6. There’s a monthly fee of $49.95 for the service.
7. There’s no usage cap, and no usage-based billing: you pay $49.95/month no matter how much Internet you use.
8. You can connect up to 5 devices to the MiFi unit via wifi. Range of the signal, in my testing, is sufficient to reach all corners of a large house.

This service is a good deal compared to the equivalent Bell Mobility service (which is, in effective, what you’re being resold a version of by Bell Aliant): with no contact you’d need to spend $199.95 for a wireless MiFi-like device, and the mobile Internet plans increase in price as you increase usage (I exceeded the 100MB entry-level $22/month cap simply by testing the device and in the 18 hours since I dropped the device off for my cousin usage has been 500MB).

To order this service do NOT call Bell Aliant’s regular customer service or support numbers, as it’s likely that the people you talk to will not know about this PEI-specific plan. And do NOT go to the Bell Aliant-branded kiosk in the Charlottetown Mall, as they are not able to provision the service there.

Instead, call the Bell Aliant Charlottetown “mobility” office at 902-566-0117 and ask about the “PEI wireless rural Internet plan,” or go and visit the office in person: it’s located in the old Island Tel maintenance building at the corner of Queen and Belvedere; park between the large headquarters building and go inside the marked entrance, then through the first door on your left and ring the bell on the desk. A (in my experience, helpful and friendly) representative will come out to assist you.

If, for some reason, you are told that the service is no longer available, or that there’s a long waiting list for hardware, point them to my experience, and mention to them that the official position of Bell Aliant, as communicated to the media after I raised the issue, is that there is no waiting list or delay in providing service to eligible customers.

Following the promise of success in my drive to get Cousin Sergii equipped with high speed Internet on the farm in Green Meadows, I headed out to Bell Aliant’s old maintenance shed at the corner of Queen and Belvedere in midtown Charlottetown yesterday. I was greeted by Marcie, who I’d spoken to earlier in the day, and she handed over a small paperback-book-sized box containing a Bell-branded Novatel MiFi 2732, a credit-card-sized device that is, in essence, a cell phone that only does data.

Oddly, I was strongly advised to not leave the battery in the unit — it can run by an internal cell-phone-sized battery or by electric plug — because “the batteries can expand” (there’s more details in this 2010 report). But, okay, we can run the device from the mains with no problem.

Marcie was very helpful: walked me through the setup of the device, gave me some tips about day-to-day usage, and so on. She’s the kind of helpful “when you call, I’ll be there”-style employee that Bell Aliant needs more of in their call centres.

I headed home to downtown Charlottetown to test the device before heading out to Green Meadows; it worked without issues: started up, found a signal and, when I connected by wifi to the device’s SSID, I was prompted for a WPA password which, helpfully, was printed on a label on the device itself.

In town the throughput wasn’t great — 0.60 Mbps down and 0.03 Mbps up, which is much less than the device’s theoretical 7.2 Mbps down and 5.7 Mbps up. But I’d been cautioned by Marcie that the service is kneecapped by Bell Aliant so as to be equivalent to the throughput on their rural wired DSL Internet, so I wasn’t expecting “high” high speeds (I can see the internal logic of this “parity” in service, but it does seem odd to handicap a device in the name of equity; I suppose the concern is the shock customers would experience otherwise when forced to “downgrade” to wired Internet).

But, even at 0.60 Mbps down, I could still make Skype calls (albeit audio-only), and surf the web (albeit at dial-up like responsiveness), so we packed everything up and headed out to Green Meadows.

On arriving we were warmly greeted by Sergey, who, without mobile or wired phone nor Internet, told us he’d spent “two days out of the world.”

I powered up the MiFi unit, set it on the window, and connected to it with my iPad and ran another speed test; to my surprise and delight the situation was much improved over the city: 3.42 Mbps down and 1.32 Mbps up. Sergii connected his laptop via wifi, fired up Skype, and was, shortly thereafter, doing a full-on video Skype call with his wife and daughters in Ukraine, taking them on a tour of the house he, for his time here on PEI, calls home.

Bringing Sergii “back into the world” and letting him reconnect with his family made all my machinations this week worth it. I snapped a photo of the happy family chatting away and sent it off to Bell Aliant, just to remind them what wonders their technology is capable of.

It’s useful to remember in all of this, that if you’d told 1994-me that there would be a day that you’d be able to pack more than a “T1” full of bandwidth into something you can slip into your pocket, I’d not have believed you. Really amazing bandwidth back then was 14.4 KBps, which is 0.0144 Mbps, or 237 times slower than what Sergii has out on the farm now.

Barring any changes in throughput (or unanticipated battery expansions), Sergii’s set now. Thanks to all who helped make this happen.

If you’ve been playing the home game, you’ll recall that when we last spoke yesterday I’d received a call from a Regional Manager at Bell Aliant letting me know that, after a day of wrangling with various parts of Bell’s operations, they were able to provide wireless Internet service to my Cousin Sergii in Green Meadows under the so-called “PEI plan.” He promised that a sales representative would call me today and, true to his word, I got a call from “Marcie” at Bell Aliant, a vision of courteous, professional, helpful service.

A “MiFi” unit has apparently been located — I was told yesterday that it might be a 6 month wait, so this is either extremely good luck or squirting oil on a squeaky wheel — and Marcie took my payment and credit information (it seemed easier for me to be the customer here, given that Sergii has no Canadian credit record) and promised to call me back later today when the hardware — a Novatel MiFi 2732 — is ready for pickup. Apparently the unit allows either a wireless or wired connection to devices, and works best when pointed toward the nearest Bell Mobility tower.

Piecing together anecdotal stories from other customers, and things told to me on the phone yesterday by Bell representatives, it seems that the “PEI plan” is an arrangement by which Bell Aliant buys wireless service from Bell Mobility, and covers the costs and obligations that would otherwise be billed to the customer — the hardware cost ($100+), the requirement for a contract, and the usage-based billing. I heard from one customer yesterday that, were they to have been billed for last month’s “PEI plan” usage at regular rates their bill would have been $468, so that’s a pretty sweet deal.

As a short nerd-out diversion, I looked up the geolocation of Green Meadows (thank you to 1996 Peter for putting the latitude and longitude on those pages) and then entered what I found — 462200 / 624400 — into the Industry Canada spectrum database, selected a radius of 10 km and a frequency range of 800 to 2000 MHz — and found the nearest active Bell Mobility tower is in Mount Stewart (map, photo), about 9.3 km away. There’s a closer tower, in West St. Peters (map, photo), about 6 km away, but Industry Canada records appear to suggest it’s not currently active, although that information might be out of date.

The specs on the MiFi 2732 suggest it’s capable of 7.2 Mbps down and 5.76 Mbps up, which certainly qualified it for “high speed”; I’ll report back what the actual throughput in the field is once it’s installed, which, I hope, will be later today.

The story of Prince Edward Island’s “holey dollar” is a fascinating one, and now the story is told in a new book, The Holey Dollars and Dumps of Prince Edward Island.

I’ve pointed to this before, but you can’t watch it too many times: this TV commercial from the days when Island Tel was a locally-managed company.

“When you call, I’ll be there. It’s good to know good friends are near, like Island Tel.”

Everyone at Bell and Bell Aliant should be required to watch this commercial, for the spirit it conveys is one that they should all aspire to, whether offering service to Islanders or to others. Island Tel may have never actually reached the intimacy they tried to describe in the commercial, but at least they believed enough in the mythical idea of good service enough to make a good job of trying.

Among other things, this might be the best locally-produced television commercial ever made on Prince Edward Island (produced by Moses Media for Island Tel).

I spent 2 hours this morning working to figure out how to get my newly-arrived Cousin Sergii outfitted with Internet at his farmhouse in Green Meadows.

It’s a house beyond the reach of either Eastlink or Bell Aliant’s wired Internet, and so, I assumed, eligible for the Government-negotiated “what to do about people who don’t have wired Internet yet” program of Bell Aliant, the one referenced in this 2010 CBC story that quotes Aliant’s Bruce Howatt describing a plan with:

• no up-front hardware cost
• no monthly bandwidth cap or usage costs
• a monthly flat-fee of $49.95

While much more expensive (and much slower) bandwidth than Sergii is used to at home in Ukraine, this was a reasonable solution, and, I assumed, would be easy to order. I thought I’d drive out to Green Meadows this evening to get Sergii set up.

Much of my 2 hours this morning was spent on telephone hold with various Bell, Bell Mobility or Bell Aliant offices, and with a couple of online chats on various Bell websites. Here’s a typical interchange (employee name redacted), an excerpt of a longer chat:

Bell: What I suggest is contacting Client care and asking you go about this, I would think that you need to go into the store and get this service started.

Bell: Just a moment while I check another source please.

Bell: Thank you for holding, do you happen to have a mobile account?

Peter: No.

Bell: That’s unfortunate, I have found a document on this and there is no explanation on who to talk to, however I wanted to note your account.

Bell: All I can suggest is calling Bell Aliant Client care, let them know that you were speaking with me on chat and that I was able to find the document about this service.

Peter: Can you tell me the name of the document or the name of the product/service so I can mention it to them?

Bell: You can let them know I looked it up in our Internal records and it shows that it is available. I am not able to provide the actual document.

Bell: I also referenced the link that you gave me, provide them with that link as well.

Peter: But can you tell me what the document is called, or at least what the product is called so I can reference it by name?

Bell: I can’t give you any information regarding Internal files.

Peter: Ok. Thank you for your help.

This chat was followed by an almost-Fawlty-Towers-like telephone chain that saw “client care” refer me to “sales,” and then “sales” refer me to “Internet department” and then “Internet department” refer me to “rural department.” Which told me that they only dealt with Quebec and Ontario and referred me to the “Atlantic number,” which rang and rang and rang and was never answered.

Some of the representatives I spoke to claimed no knowledge of the PEI-specific service, others, like my chat correspondent above, acknowledged it but refused to give it a name. Nobody could tell me how to order it, or where.

At this point — actually, it went on for a while longer, but I’ll spare you the details — I gave up.

And called my friend Perry.

Perry, it turns out, was a customer of this mysterious product that-must-not-be-named. He’s been a customer since January. It’s worked well for him. He’ll be sad to see it go when it gets replaced by wired Internet next week (in part because moving to wired Internet will be a step down for him bandwidth-wise and a step-up price-wise).

Perry told me that to learn the truth I needed to go to the old Island Tel maintenance shed at the corner of Belvedere and Queen Streets in midtown Charlottetown (I know this shed well because, in an earlier time, it was where all the cool kids went to get cell phone problems solved that couldn’t be solved next door at Island Tel Mobility HQ).

So I hopped in the car and drove up. Went to the old Queen Street door, but it was barred. Went around to the other side where I found a non-descript office.

I rang the bell.

A friendly woman came out to help me.

She was a little skittish about revealing the details at first, and was quick to dispell any notions I might have of leaving with the service in-hand. But she did give the background: the program still exists, is a good deal, and is still supported. The problem is that the hardware used to support it — MiFi — is no longer manufactured, and, as this is the only hardware they support, they’re unable to sign up new customers until used hardware comes back in and gets reconditioned.

I asked how long this might take — “a few weeks or 6 months?” — and was told that customers who’d showed up in the summer to start their vacations never received hardware. Coded message received: “don’t hold your breath.”

I left my name, and took their number, and was advised to “call back every 2 or 3 weeks” to see if they have any new hardware in stock.

Exasperated by the apparently shared delusion that there’s actually a service being offered — if you call something a “service” and maintain that it still “exists” but are unable to offer it, is it really still a service? — I responded to a Twitter request from CBC Radio’s Kerry Campbell and we made arrangements to come into the station for me to tell my tale of woe.

All I want it to get Sergii hooked up to the net so that he can chat to home, use Google Translate and do the normal things that normal people do online. I hope we can make that happen.

There is, of course, also a large issue: is Bell Aliant living up to the spirit of the arrangement it concluded with the Province of PEI to provide high speed Internet to all Islanders?

There’s a moral issue there, but also a very practical one: if any area of the province can truly benefit from being more “connected” it is rural PEI. For the eye to be so far off the ball on making sure that rural Islanders have as much bandwidth as it’s technically possible to provide them with, at a price point equivalent to urban Islanders, is an issue that has broad ramifications for economic development, education, and quality of life.

I hope that gets some attention too.

Update: at 4:40 p.m. this afternoon I got a friendly call from a director at Bell Aliant notifying me that I’ll be called in the morning by a service representative, who will take payment details and arrange to have high-speed wireless service provisioned for Sergii. This doesn’t solve the larger “why is this so difficult a program to find out about,” but I hope it reflects a new commitment by Bell Aliant to ensure that the wireless “stop gap” program continues to be available to rural Islanders.

It’s a bad couple of weeks for analog here on Prince Edward Island: first Queen’s Printer stopped printing and then, on Sunday, City Cinema projected its last 35mm film. In both cases the enterprises continue — Queen’s Printer duplicates digitally now, and City Cinema projects digitally — but their analog technologies, more than 100 years old in both cases, are retiring.

City Cinema’s 35mm projector had a rather more honourable retirement than the offset presses up the road: the 7:15 showing of Cloudburst was followed by a Q&A with the film’s writer/director Thom Fitzgerald, producer Doug Pettigrew, and stars Ryan Doucette and Marlane O’Brien, and then a reception at The Haviland Club.

Many years ago I was substitute projectionist at City Cinema for a week, filling in for owner Derek Martin who was traveling. It was, without a doubt, the most harrowing job I’ve ever had: an exhausting film-winding-on-to-big-reels process at the beginning of the week followed by night after night of waiting for the projector bulb to burst or the film to split or some other calamity to befall the operation (as it happens the film did split, delaying the start of the second show by 30 minutes; 30 very stressful minutes).

As with letterpress (and even offset) printing, there was a physicality to film projection, an intimate relationship between person and machine, that is almost completely missing from the digital era. While it’s easy to be needlessly nostalgic about all this, the simple notion that someone is paying attention to the craft is something to give thought to: it’s so easy to be completely absent from a process where media gets created and distributed by pressing “Play” or “Print” on a machine, and I can’t help but think that has an effect on the result.

We’ve survived and thrived in the post-analog world of so many other media — all my TV streams into the house on the Internet now, I haven’t used an analog phone in years — so I expect we’ll survive this to. And this week will be one of the weeks we remember when we’re trying to remember the time before the bits took over.

While going through a bag of old VHS video tapes yesterday I came across this recording of Matthew Rainnie reporting for CBC Compass on the then-new website for The Buzz newspaper that I launched as a side-project with Buzz owner Peter Richards and ISN owner Kevin O’Brien. Even though it’s only 17 years ago, the language — “information superhighway” comes up several times — and the technology — it looks like very-early Netscape running on Peter’s Mac — makes it seem like we’re talking about the advent of the telegraph. 

I digitized the video in the Collaboratory at Robertson Library at the University of PEI, which has excellent (and free) facilities for converted VHS videotapes, audio cassettes and vinyl records to digital files: