WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

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This is not a normal video.

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I have about 20 minutes until the boat carrying
me back to my ship leaves,

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but I am currently on a hill in Ilulisset
in Greenland,

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along with John, who works for Tele Post Greenland,

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and Jakob, who is my translator here, and
who is also holding my microphone inside his coat!

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And the reason we're here is because this
is the microwave relay site for this entire town

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and, by extension, everywhere north.

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And John here has kindly agreed to answer
a few questions.

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This, er, this is going to be a slightly rough
video!

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The largest package you can get is about four
megabits.

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And how long does it take you to upload something?

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Ah, well, the upload speed is .7 megabits
per second.

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So it takes a horrendous amount of time to
upload anything.

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There's a line of sight all the way from the
south,

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from mountaintop to mountaintop, all the way
up here, and way up north.

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So we should actually be able to see the other
relay tower.

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Where is the next relay station?

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[Speaks Greenlandic]

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[Speaks Greenlandic]
Where is the next one?

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[Speaks Greenlandic]
Near Qasigiannguit.

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Ah! All right.

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So the next relay station is about 40km south
of here, in Qasigiannguit.

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It's an unbroken link.

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But, of course, there can be some obstructions.

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There's actually a fun little story about
the next village up,

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it's only 8km away, but there was a huge iceberg
that

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shadowed it from here, so they actually had
no internet this summer.

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But also if there's a relay station which
loses power, down south,

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we might actually also lose it up here.

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So there was a whole day where there was no
internet up here

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due to a relay station that had some bad batteries,
I think it was.

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If there's a southern station that goes out,
all the way up north, there's no signal.

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They can't pull the sea cable away through
here, due to these massive icebergs.

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They scrape along the bottom of the ocean,
so for next year

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they're going to upgrade all the system.

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They're going to pull the sea cable

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all the way from Nuuk, all the way to Aasiaat,
which is about 120km-ish that way.

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And they're going to upgrade these cell towers
to carry high-speed connections,

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all the way up to Uummannaq as well.

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[Speaks Greenlandic]

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During the winter, these domes get covered
up fully with ice,

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so they need to go and, er...

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John, thank you so much!

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Jakob, holding my microphone, thank you so
much!

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You're welcome.

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That was not exactly the usual sort of video...

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Let me turn this camera right.

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There we go!

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That was really not the sort of usual video
that I do, but

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thank you very much, Jakob here just kind
of emailed me

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when I said I was coming here, and said "do
you want to film a thing?"

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-- Thank you!
-- You're welcome.

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Let me move that camera... there we go.

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Thank you so much!

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That's brilliant!

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I'm here with Chris Hadfield's Generator Arctic,
and so's he!

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My name is Tim Kellner, I have a YouTube channel
"Tim to the Wild",

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and I make short, little cinematic travel
films.

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Go check out everything by him and all the
other folks out on this project!