Altona town council is making a significant investment in the construction of its own fibre optic network.

Council signed a letter of intent in June authorizing Valley Fibre out of Winkler to begin constructing the network.

"The financial commitment is up to $600,000 and is based on the estimated cost of installing the town's own network," said town CAO Dan Gagne. "The idea is to connect the facilities that the town owns such as the Civic Centre, Police Station, Library, Millennium Exhibition Centre and the Fire Hall. All of these buildings would be connected."

Gagne says they have funding in place to pay for the project and will likely apply for funding under the federal government's Investment In Canada program, which has money earmarked for broadband Internet service in rural and remote areas of Canada.

The town's commitment to build its own network will have some savings attached to it, according to Gagne.

"Currently our buildings are connected through a wireless network provided by VISP. The decision to move to our own system would decrease some of the networking costs we currently have, because we would all be directly connected to our own private network and that would certainly reduce some of our operating costs."

Once the town's private network is in place, Valley Fibre will begin building off of that infrastructure to create a public network that will service local residents with Internet speeds currently not offered to residents right now.

Construction on the network is expected to begin this year and completed in 2019.