Eight communities here in the southeast are going to get fiber optic high speed internet service. They are Friedensfeld, Bristol, Greenland, New Bothwell, Otterburne, St. Malo, Ste. Agathe and Aubigny. Valley Fiber of Winkler has received a $6.9 million federal grant under the Connect to Innovate program to bring the cable to a number of Manitoba communities including these eight. It is also contributing $794,000 to the project.

Conley Kehler, senior vice-president of Valley Fiber, explains this is the first step in providing service to these communities.

"What this funding does is it brings digital backbone fiber up to the doorstep of the community. It doesn't put fiber to the home. That's a conversation we need to have further with the municipalities and with the towns that are affected. It brings the digital backbone fiber to the community and that's where it stops. We'll need to decide how we're going to deal with it from there."

Kehler says this fiber cable allows them to deliver a very high level of internet service with speeds of up to 1 gigabyte per second.

"Valley Fiber is a high density fiber build, so it's dedicated fiber, which means every customer on the Valley Fiber network receives their own strand of fiber. The importance of that is that we can guarantee speeds on our network and the ability to take advantage of more services like security in your home, IP (internet protocol) T-V, VOIP (voice over internet protocol) phone, all those things that come with better internet connections."

He notes any farms or rural residences along the route of the trenched-in cable will also be eligible to connect to it.

"With the high density fiber that runs down the road, we can break out at any place. So any farm, any home, any business that's along this digital backbone, can also take advantage of having a gigabyte per second of fiber internet speeds right into their home."

Kehler says they will be meeting with the various municipalities over the winter and hope to begin the project next spring.

"We're hoping that by next year we have shovels in the ground on the east side of the river. But again, all those conversations need to take place. We'll start those real soon and then we'll probably do all of our planning over the winter and see what that can look like, probably next spring, maybe later in the year, but certainly within the next two years."

Kehler says it's a fact of life that people need reliable high speed internet service for a variety of reasons.

"Their Netflix experience will certainly improve but that's simply just a byproduct of what high speed fiber can do for our communities. All sectors of business continue to improve products and services and all of this requires reliable and scaleable internet connections. Without Connect to Innovate to bring this digital backbone, none of that can be real. You know education, health, emergency services, all those things can drastically improve from where they are now. We're looking forward to how we can bring that into rural Manitoba and it's important as rural Manitoba continues to grow."