Driving Towards Connectivity Equity Grand Manan Island, NB
Innovative asset-mapping approach brings high-speed Internet to Rural Canada
The Situation
Grand Manan Island, located off the coast of New Brunswick, Canada, faced a significant connectivity challenge. With a small population spread across the island and limited broadband infrastructure, residents and businesses struggled with inadequate internet services.
The lack of high-speed connectivity hindered essential activities such as online education, telehealth services, and business operations. The high costs and logistical difficulties of deploying Fiber to the Home (FTTH) in such a remote location made traditional broadband expansion methods impractical.
Overview
Eagle Engineering and Consulting (Eagle), a leader in telecommunications solutions, partnered with Crave Technologies, a telecommunications provider committed to expanding broadband access, to bridge the digital divide on Grand Manan Island. Leveraging its reality capture and mobile mapping expertise, Eagle set out to design and implement a fiber-optic network that would provide reliable high-speed internet access to the community. To accomplish this, the company needed a more efficient, accurate, and cost-effective way to collect infrastructure data for network planning and deployment.
The Challenge
Traditional field data collection methods relied on manual surveys using handheld GPS devices and utility-pole inspections. These approaches were time-consuming, labour-intensive, and prone to inaccuracies. Additionally, working in rugged and remote terrain presented safety concerns for field crews. Given the island’s geographical constraints, Eagle needed a solution that could provide precise asset mapping while minimizing disruptions to residents and reducing project timelines.
The Solution
Eagle Engineering deployed a vehicle-mounted mobile mapping system, integrating the Trimble MX7 mobile imaging solution. This advanced technology enabled Eagle to rapidly collect high-resolution 360-degree imagery and spatial data at highway speeds, achieving mapping accuracies between 3cm to 5cm. By using this cutting-edge approach, Eagle significantly enhanced data accuracy and efficiency while reducing the time required for infrastructure mapping. The mobile mapping system captured critical utility pole and roadway data in just 10 hours, covering 125 km of roads and collecting detailed information on 3,700 poles. This represented a time savings of over 90% compared to manual data capture methods, which would have taken weeks to complete. Eric Langin, the Director of Implementation for Eagle, stated, “We’ve completely redefined the way infrastructure data is collected. What once took weeks of meticulous, labour-intensive work can now be completed in mere hours, all while achieving an unprecedented level of accuracy.”
To further validate the efficiency of mobile mapping, Langin selected a 12 km route and conducted a comparative field-data collection test between traditional walking GNSS surveys and mobile mapping. A two-person crew took seven hours to capture 200 poles along the route, whereas Langin completed the same task in 12 minutes while driving at 70 km/h, achieving an impressive 93%-time savings.
The Outcome
The implementation of mobile mapping technology proved to be a pivotal innovation for Grand Manan Island. By leveraging rapid and accurate data collection, Eagle Engineering successfully designed and executed a fiber-optic network for Crave Technologies that brought high-speed connectivity to previously underserved areas.
Key outcomes included:
Enhanced Efficiency: The mobile mapping approach reduced data collection time from weeks to mere hours, streamlining project timelines and lowering costs.
Improved Accuracy: The precision of the captured data ensured optimal network planning, minimizing rework and installation errors.
Expanded Connectivity: The fiber-optic network provided broadband access to 600 homes, with ongoing efforts to extend coverage to 99% of the island’s residents.
Community Impact: High-speed internet access enabled residents to engage in remote work, education, healthcare services, and digital commerce, fostering economic growth and improved quality of life.
Through its innovative reality capture solutions, Eagle Engineering, in partnership with Crave Technologies, transformed Grand Manan’s digital landscape, demonstrating how technology-driven approaches can bridge the connectivity gap in remote and rural communities.
Read more about the Grand Manan mobile mapping project in this Geoconnexion article.