For the third time this summer, the deliberate cutting of fibre optic lines has left huge swaths of northern BC without internet, TV, cell service, home phone, emergency and digital payment processing services.
The first cut occurred on May 2nd roughly 20 kilometers outside of the city of Burns Lake. The disruption began just after 3 am, and affected everything north of Burns lake including the archipelago of Haida Gwaii which is more than 700km away. The media reports that the “outage significantly hampered local commerce, particularly in Prince Rupert, where a cruise ship’s passengers [which had just landed] and residents were unable to use point-of-sale systems at many vendors.”
After this cut CityWest (an internet provider) disclosed (in a poorly redacted PDF oops) that over 22k internet customer and over 8k phone customers were impacted. They also went on to provide commentary
While the fibre damage itself was unavoidable, the breadth and duration of the outage were amplified by architectural dependencies, including centralized DNS/DHCP services, centralized authentication, and limited resilient access paths for operations staff. CityWest is implementing targeted measures to reduce the impact of these in the event of future outages
The second instance of sabotage occurred in broad daylight at 1pm on August second in the Mount Hayes area along Highway 16. Telus reported that “significant damage to the fibre lines” occurred and the “home phone, internet, TV and cell phone services for customers in many Northern B.C. communities including Terrace, Masset, Kitimat, Prince Rupert, Smithers, Burns Lake, and Fraser Lake” were affected. After nearly 10 hours, services had been restored. In both cases the media and police where quick to blame copper thieves for the incident—their words and published photos point to what must be enterprising copper thieves crawling up telephone poles and cutting what look like live wires…
On Aug. 11, the third cut occurred. The region’s fibre optics infrastructure was particularly vulnerable because of wildfire activity which had burnt the existing lines, and a separate cut of a third-party carrier’s network in Alberta. So all in all, one line was burnt by wildfire, one cut in BC and another cut in Alberta. In response to a summer of repeated fibre optics disruptions, the telecom provider CityWest said it is planning on building an additional line along Highway 37, dubbing it the “Northern Resiliency Project.” To increase resilience, they hope to establish a new and physically separate telecommunications route through the north. Notably, Highway 37 is the key access point for much of the region’s mining and shipping logistics.
Naturally, all these unfortunate occurrences have been labeled as side effects of attempted copper thefts. But perhaps, in an upside-down world which relegates our lives to the networks of computer, cables and industrialism, another story makes more sense?
– Unsung