Toronto businessman's social project

He wants to lay a fiber-optic cable along the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, connecting northern Canada with Europe   

For years, the Canadian Arctic has been geographically, economically and socially isolated from national life. Now, former telecommunications analyst and investment banker Doug Cunningham of Toronto plans to connect the eastern Arctic with the rest of the world with high-speed broadband. The project is estimated at $640 million and will require 15,000 kilometers of cable.
Canada's northern communities will have faster, more reliable Internet and telephone service than with Telesat satellites.
"Global demand for submarine fiber optic cables is growing 50 percent a year, and for some destinations, mostly from Asia, even higher," says Julian Rovel, managing partner of consulting firm Pioneer.
This project will compete with the Russian project, which is supposed to connect London and Tokyo. The fiber-optic cable, 17 thousand kilometers long, will run along the bottom of the seas of the Far North of Russia. It will also compete with the Telesat satellite system, which serves Canada's North.
Telesat CEO Dan Goldberg thinks Cunningham's project is unrealistic. "The whole thing is a crazy idea . . it's just not rational from a business standpoint," Goldberg said. On the one hand, Europe and Asia are already served by fiber optic cable, and on the other hand, the population density in the Canadian Arctic makes it impossible to make the project commercially viable.
However, Cunningham said it was more of a social project than a commercial one. "I'm 60 years old, and I wanted to do something for social benefit," Cunningham said.

Based on foreign press for ForTrader.org