No more Morenet: City of Morden cutting cord on plan to provide free internet for all residents

Residents in the southern Manitoba city of Morden will have to say goodbye to their relatively new high-speed, community-owned internet this month — less than 18 months after it started.

As of Oct. 30, Morenet — the wireless internet service provided as a City of Morden service — will be shutting down all operations, the city announced in an online update late Monday.

"It ballooned out of control," said Mayor Brandon Burley.

The city of roughly 8,000 announced the internet service in April 2018, saying it would be built and maintained by the city through property taxes and offered at no extra monthly fee to users, following a $400 installation fee.

The whole project was estimated to cost between $300,000 and $400,000, and city officials said at the time property taxes wouldn't increase to cover the cost.

Costs skyrocketed

But Burley said the city hit a hurdle when it learned about technical challenges related to bandwidth that made the annual cost of providing free internet service skyrocket.

"It's in the many millions of dollars, and the operating cost would make it our second-biggest utility," said Burley, who was elected in the October 2018 municipal election — months after the service's May launch.

"The previous council made the right decision to approve it" based on the information they had at the time, Burley said, but "those numbers have inflated ... between 700 and 1,000 per cent."

The new city council found out about the major cost hike in May of this year, and tried unsuccessfully to sell Morenet, before coming to the decision to cancel it at a recent council meeting.

"We sat down with the project, with experts, and considered it as though it were a brand new project," Burley said.

We acknowledge that we have some of the worst connection speeds probably in the country down here.- Morden Mayor Brandon Burley

He said the majority of the spike in the expected cost came from a misunderstanding about the capacity of telecommunications infrastructure available in the Morden area.

The plan would require upgrading the city to fibre optic connections — an expensive fix. Burley said council was concerned that the service would be unable to "resist inflation," and the city wasn't ready to explore other funding models.

By the time the service was cut, it had made it into about 450 homes in the city.

"We had only gotten the service to about one out of every eight households before we had already surpassed the budget quite substantially," Burley said.

"The majority of people in Morden, myself included, never got Morenet but we were paying for it through our taxes."

Although there are still options to access private internet providers, service quality and speed can range in the rural community, depending on location. The city is still trying to figure out how to resolve inequities.

"We acknowledge that we have some of the worst connection speeds probably in the country down here. And it's really difficult to build a community, an economy, in that context," Burley said.

As an alternative, Burley said the city has "aggressively pursued" talks with fibre companies and big internet companies to figure out how to provide high-speed internet to the community. Burley said the city has picked up discussions with Bell MTS and Valley Fiber — a technology firm based out of Winkler — on how to proceed.

Meanwhile, residents who paid the $400 installation fee — expecting to pay no monthly charges after that — won't be able to get a refund for the fee.

Reaction to the announcement on social media ranged, with some users on the city's Facebook page saying they were disappointed to see it go, and others saying the city made a prudent decision.