The Town of High River is hoping residents will make their views known on bringing high speed fibre optic internet to the community.

The Town's manager of information services, Kent Blair says they hope to be able to attract more high tech businesses to the area although the benefits are restricted to the high tech sector.

"Maybe you're a tele-worker and you work for an engineering firm and you need to upload really big digital drawings and that type of data to a firm, say in Calgary, that's definitly one of the advantages of having high spped networking in the town of High River," Blair says.

An Alberta-based company, Axia, has expressed an interest in developing a fibre optic network for the town.

The Town's encouraging interested residents and business owners to go to Axia's website and express their interest.

"Thirty per cent of residents and businesses in town would need to express themselves through their (Axia's) website and from that piont what they would do is start talking to the municipality for municipal access and planning and doing all their engineering," Blair says.

He says Shaw is actually bringing a fibre point of presence to the downtown core so that business downtown can either be serviced by fibre optic or by their coaxial cable. He says they're also working on a new development that woul;d make fibre optic speeds available through their coaxial network.

There are no upfront fees to pay to Axia for signing up and expressing your interest in the service and they won't be contacting anyone until they've reached that 30 per cent level of responses.