The School of Computer Science at the University of Guelph has partnered with an award-winning startup to revolutionize connectivity across Northern Canada.
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The Maple Ridge-based tech company Left[2] has teamed up with the University of Guelph to launch a $2.1 million project with Mitacs[3] to spread Mitacs’ patented mobile mesh network to a wide range of remote communities in Canada.
This is the largest partnership the School of Computer Science has ever undertaken, incorporating “120 graduate student internships over five years, from universities across Canada.” Left and Mitacs are providing the majority of the funding for this project, while the cooperation of universities across Canada will lay the groundwork for an ambitious connectivity project.
Mitacs’ platform, RightMesh, operates as a traditional mesh network for internet connectivity. As University of Guelph Professor Jason Ernst put it, mesh networking “allows people to connect with each other using the Bluetooth, Wi-Fi or Wi-Fi Direct capabilities built into smartphones, even if those phones are currently offline.”
Essentially, devices which are physically able to connect to the internet are able to act as nodes in an ad hoc network, so that individual devices can connect to these nodes, and these nodes can in turn connect to the internet. As long as the Wi-Fi or Bluetooth-enabled devices are connected to a device that is itself connected to the internet, these devices can tap into the internet off of this connection.
Such an ambitious project was made possible through the combined efforts of these tech companies and the participating universities of Canada. As the press report stated, places like “the Inuit community of Rigolet, Nunatsiavut, where climate change has negatively affected food security, health and wellness, and personal safety” will reap some of the largest
