Back in 2017, SaskTel and the provincial government committed to improving coverage for rural customers in Saskatchewan. Residents in the southeast part of the province, specifically in Midale, are now seeing the result of that commitment.

As of today, brand new services launched in the town that will see significantly improved cellphone coverage as well as the addition of LTE services in that area. It's one of a proposed 50 new cell towers in smaller centres around the province. 

Director of External Communications for SaskTel, Michelle Englot, said it's not just cell service that is being upgraded.

"We are launching a small site solution in eight new communities and Midale is one of those communities. We're looking at significantly improved download speeds on your wireless internet and improving the capacity on our wireless network," she explained.

With eight more towers in rural communities up and running, SaskTel is rapidly approaching their goal by the end of March 2019. 

"Our employees have been working really hard on this initiative. It's been a significant undertaking for us and we're very pleased that we're pretty much on track," Englot noted. "We had hoped to complete 50 new towers by the end of March and we'll be very close to having that done." 

Following the completion of this phase of the project, the telecommunications company is proposing to have 41 more small site towers constructed before April 2020. Some of those areas would include Halbrite, Minton, Pangman and Ceylon.