This is not a normal video.
I have about 20 minutes until the boat carrying me back to my ship leaves,
but I am currently on a hill in Ilulisset in Greenland,
along with John, who works for Tele Post Greenland,
and Jakob, who is my translator here, and who is also holding my microphone inside his coat!
And the reason we're here is because this is the microwave relay site for this entire town
and, by extension, everywhere north.
And John here has kindly agreed to answer a few questions.
This, er, this is going to be a slightly rough video!
The largest package you can get is about four megabits.
And how long does it take you to upload something?
Ah, well, the upload speed is .7 megabits per second.
So it takes a horrendous amount of time to upload anything.
There's a line of sight all the way from the south,
from mountaintop to mountaintop, all the way up here, and way up north.
So we should actually be able to see the other relay tower.
Where is the next relay station?
[Speaks Greenlandic]
Where is the next one?
[Speaks Greenlandic] Near Qasigiannguit.
Ah! All right.
So the next relay station is about 40km south of here, in Qasigiannguit.
It's an unbroken link.
But, of course, there can be some obstructions.
There's actually a fun little story about the next village up,
it's only 8km away, but there was a huge iceberg that
shadowed it from here, so they actually had no internet this summer.
But also if there's a relay station which loses power, down south,
we might actually also lose it up here.
So there was a whole day where there was no internet up here
due to a relay station that had some bad batteries, I think it was.
If there's a southern station that goes out, all the way up north, there's no signal.
They can't pull the sea cable away through here, due to these massive icebergs.
They scrape along the bottom of the ocean, so for next year
they're going to upgrade all the system.
They're going to pull the sea cable
all the way from Nuuk, all the way to Aasiaat, which is about 120km-ish that way.
And they're going to upgrade these cell towers to carry high-speed connections,
all the way up to Uummannaq as well.
[Speaks Greenlandic]
During the winter, these domes get covered up fully with ice,
so they need to go and, er...
John, thank you so much!
Jakob, holding my microphone, thank you so much!
You're welcome.
That was not exactly the usual sort of video...
Let me turn this camera right.
There we go!
That was really not the sort of usual video that I do, but
thank you very much, Jakob here just kind of emailed me
when I said I was coming here, and said "do you want to film a thing?"
-- Thank you! -- You're welcome.
Let me move that camera... there we go.
Thank you so much!
That's brilliant!
I'm here with Chris Hadfield's Generator Arctic, and so's he!
My name is Tim Kellner, I have a YouTube channel "Tim to the Wild",
and I make short, little cinematic travel films.
Go check out everything by him and all the other folks out on this project!