When I woke up one morning this past May, internet, cellular, and landline services had been out for about twelve hours. Local CBC radio was reporting that wildfires in northern British Columbia and the Northwest Territories had damaged the fibre-optic lines connecting the Yukon to the wider network. Some NWT communities were affected too. Here in Whitehorse, I heard that long lines stretched from downtown ATMs as debit and credit machines went down. With 911 not working, ambulances parked at central locations to provide emergency assistance if needed.
I had plans for a three-hour trail run. My partner and I debated if it was a good idea. I always take my phone as a precaution, but it would be useless. I chose to go but brought our InReach, a satellite communication device, wrote down my exact route, and told my partner to come looking if I wasn’t home in four hours. Thankfully, the run was uneventful. When I emerged from the woods, the Yukon was still offline. That afternoon, wireless internet began to return, with most of the territory fully connected by evening.
If you live in the North, you’re accustomed to laggy Zoom calls, random outages, and slow-as-molasses internet. (There are even memes about it.) In a 2022 Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission survey of Northern Canadians, 92.9 percent found telecom services too unreliable to meet their daily needs. Doctors and nurses struggle to send or receive patient results, businesses can’t process sales, and residents have trouble accessing essential services, like online banking, education, and counselling.
Several factors contribute to this predicament. The North is a huge, sparsely populated region, so creating and maintaining infrastructure is labour intensive and costly. Our physical connection to the southern network is also fragile. Two fibre-optic lines feed internet service to most of the Yukon; one enters from northern British Columbia and the other comes from Alberta via the NWT. Damage to the lines—often accidentally, by construction crews—is common.
These logistical and technical challenges make it difficult for new entrants to establish profitable operations, reducing the incentive for competition. Nationally, Rogers, Bell, and Telus hold a telecom monopoly, but the situation is bleaker in the territories. Here, Bell subsidiary Northwestel has a virtual lock on Northern households. In CRTC submissions, many blame that lack of competition for driving up bills. An unlimited Rogers plan in southern Canada, with a download speed of 100 megabytes per second, costs $60 per month. In Whitehorse, a 500-gigabyte Northwestel plan with the same download speed will set you back $140. People pay more and get less.
Even with this low baseline, this year has been particularly bad. In addition to the May incident, residents experienced a twelve-hour outage in July and another one—affecting the three territories—in August. Then, over the past few months, many Yukoners have experienced spotty cell coverage and frequent dropped calls. In the summer, phone calls I made cut out repeatedly.
Complaints reached such a fever pitch that Premier Ranj Pillai called out Bell, saying “Yukoners are pissed” about “terrible” service. CEO Mirko Bibic responded with a public letter, saying Bell was investing $22 million in its cellular network in the territory over the next three years. A month later, Pillai raised the issue again, urging Bell to compensate Yukoners. While other phone companies operate here—I’m with Virgin, for instance—they all rely on the use of Bell’s towers. Pillai encouraged Yukoners with other providers to demand reimbursement. He also suggested filing a complaint with the Commission for Complaints for Telecom-Television Services.
It’s no surprise exasperated Yukoners have been turning to Elon Musk’s Starlink for satellite internet, though it seems to be too popular of late. As of now, Starlink’s website says it’s at capacity for addresses within Whitehorse city limits.
While it’s tough to be optimistic, the reliability of the Yukon’s connection is expected to improve when the Dempster Fibre Line goes live in December. The 778-kilometre backup line connects Dawson City, Yukon, to Inuvik, NWT, and plugs into the existing Mackenzie Valley Fibre Link. And a consortium of Northern Indigenous organizations is in the process of buying Northwestel for up to $1 billion, with the goal of boosting connectivity across the North.
After the Yukon’s outages last summer, a Whitehorse business owner told the CBC that each one cost him money. James Maltby, who owns the restaurant and brewery Woodcutter’s Blanket, said that when the internet went down over the summer, he and his staff collected patrons’ names and phone numbers and hoped they’d come back to pay their bills. He’s joined the wait list for Starlink: “I have no doubt in my mind that Northwestel will go down again.”
With thanks to the Gordon Foundation for supporting the work of writers from Canada’s North.
