In Rigolet there are no cellphone towers and the throughput of the network there when we first started going there was about one megabit per second. It's now usually around two to four megabits per second, and there are still many people in the town who aren't connected. About 300 people live there and there are about a hundred houses. Many of the people don't actually have a direct connection to the Internet. So they gave us a map of everyone in the town showing the houses that have connections and the houses that are sharing with other people and the houses that aren't connected at all.
They've built this app to try to document the climate change that's going on there. They're monitoring the environment. They're documenting their experiences, but the problem is that it doesn't work very well because the Internet is so limited up there. They invited us in to try to use some of the technology we're building to be able to improve the connectivity in the town. So rather than going up through the Internet for everything, they're able to share from phone to phone to phone and offload some of the traffic from the Internet.
Some of the work that we're doing that supports this is through a Mitacs grant. We received this grant about six months ago now. It was a $2.13 million grant supporting 15 or 16 Ph.D. students and four post-docs over the next three to five years. That's mainly to help with the really technical challenges for some of this stuff, but it's also to support [Technical difficulty--Editor] within the community, doing trials and doing pilot projects up in the north.
We've also had a lot of interest from other communities in the north. This is just our first community up in Rigolet, but many of the other places in Nunatsiavut have also been interested, places like Nain. The other partner in the project, Dan Gillis from the University of Guelph—that's the main university we're working with—has also been meeting with people in Nunavut. We've also partnered with a bunch of the other universities involved in the project. The app they're building is called eNuk. It involves Memorial University and the University of Alberta. We're also working with UBC. This grant is really the way we've been bringing together universities across Canada to solve this problem in a unique way that doesn't necessarily depend on infrastructure.
We know about the types of initiatives where you can throw a lot of money out the window, build a lot of expensive infrastructure, but there are also unique ways to solve the problem using the things that people already have, the funds they already have. We're coming at it with that type of approach.