Nunavummiut to be surveyed about satellite outage

The Nunavut Broadband Development Corporation wants to know how Nunavummiut were affected by last month’s satellite outage.

The corporation launched a communications outage survey Monday on its website.

The Anik F2 satellite malfunctioned on Oct. 6, leaving all Nunavut communities without internet or long-distance telephone services for 16 hours. Communities in the Northwest Territories and Yukon were also affected.

Oana Spinu is the corporation’s executive director.

"It provided kind of a perfect experiment, if I can say, to gauge how telecommunications is for any kind of activity in the territory whether you're talking about work, whether you're talking about your personal life or whether you're talking about government delivery of services," said Spinu.

Spinu says the outage shows the dependence Nunavummiut have on telecommunications.

The survey is available in English and Inuktitut. It will be online until Nov. 18.

The Nunavut Broadband Development Corporation is a non-profit advocacy group. It plans to use the survey data to push for more reliable telecommunications in the territory.