First off, this column carries a First World problems warning.
Secondly, it’s being typed on an cell phone, one which, horror of horrors, has endured a summer of very poor cell coverage.
We’re on our way to the family cabin at Sandy Lake, Man. It’s about 20 minutes from Clear Lake, Riding Mountain National Park. Sandy Lake is a nice little hamlet, not some resort village in the boonies. It’s well within what most people would consider civilization. But in the 21st century context, it might as well be the moon.
Anyone who complains about SaskTel cellular service, shut up and cross the line into southern Manitoba. I’ll show you what poor service is.
As soon as you cross the border, it’s like you enter the portion of the map labelled “there be dragons.”
Unless you are on Highway 1, cellular coverage in almost all of southwest Manitoba is atrocious to the point of almost nonexistent. I have heard this many times from people in Manitoba’s oilpatch, which is only found in this region.
Only near Virden and close proximity to Rivers do we get anything approaching the level of service I get in almost any pasture in southeast Saskatchewan. Trust me, covering the oilpatch, I spend a lot of time in pastures.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a small town or secondary highway; in southwest Manitoba your coverage is garbage.
On the Main Street of Sandy Lake, I cannot make a call, or check email. At our cabin I have found that I can occasionally get three bars slanting on the left side of the barbecue, but not the right.
I was doing stories on Virden for Pipeline News and staying in the camper we have as a bunkhouse at the cabin. The only way I could make calls is to slightly open an overhead cupboard, put the phone on speakerphone, and talk at it from a certain angle.
We had a contractor doing work on the cabin. I watched the foreman climb on top of the load on their semi, trying to get a call out. I’m not certain he was successful. Most of the locals don’t have semis conveniently available to climb on.
In nearby Erickson, it is also nearly impossible to make a cell phone call. We discovered the Co-op Building Centre there had good coverage, but why? It turns out they had to install a cellular booster in the building.
I finally found I could get four bars if I parked on the side of the road near a house on the top of a hill along the highway at Sandy Lake. That’s how I phoned home once a day. I suspect they wondered why this Ford kept parking there, but I think they know they have the only real cell coverage around and put two and two bars together to get four.
First World problems, right?
Sure, until you realize how intrinsic wireless communication is in everyday life in the 21st century. It’s beyond just phone calls. It’s email, social media, banking through your phone, even the basic functions of phones. For instance, iPhones will often offload music to the cloud, making room for other items in its onboard memory. Works fine if you have coverage, but not worth a damn in southwest Manitoba.
In the oilpatch, wells often have cellular-based telemetry to transmit24/7 what is going on. But how do they do that if they can’t rely on the cellular system? Someone told me the oil company had to set up their own radio system instead.
Many vehicles now offer built-in hotspots. I wonder how that works here? Using my iPhone as a hotspot, it turns into a cold spot the precise moment we cross the border.
I can work anywhere I have internet. I don’t need to be sitting at a desk. But doing so here has been difficult, to say the least.
I’m only a visitor. I’ve asked lots of locals, and they all have similar experiences. Essentially, cell coverage in Manitoba is awful unless you are on a major highway or in a major centre. It confirms my hypothesis that the rest of Manitoba might as well not exist outside the provincial centre of the universe, Winnipeg. I have not struggled with cellular coverage this bad in rural Saskatchewan since the 1990s. Here, it’s the norm. The less-than-helpful guys at the Bell MTS store in the Brandon mall explained it will take several more years for things to improve.
I guess southwest Manitoba gets to join the 21st century 20 years late.
Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at brian.zinchuk@sasktel.net.
