On February 1st at 1 p.m., a rock slide occurred in North Bend, BC, which cut a fibre line that provides internet and data services to several telecommunications companies, including ourselves.
Most of our Internet traffic went through this fibre line to Vancouver. Once the cut happened, we re-routed our network traffic east through Prince George to Calgary, but unfortunately this part of our network does not have the same bandwidth capacity as the Vancouver link and we are not able to purchase more. Since there is more traffic going through a smaller circuit, this results in congestion across our service area. It is another reason why we are building the Connected Coast network down the coast of British Columbia.
The outage has lasted the entire weekend because work crews must first clean up the site to ensure it’s safe for fibre technicians to enter. The last update we received is that technicians should be able to start their work on the afternoon of Feb. 3, and at that time they should be able to provide an estimate when services would be fully restored. Please check our Facebook page here for the most up-to-date information we have.
Finally, we have heard reports that some of our customers had experienced no Internet services at all, rather than just slow speeds. We have implemented a solution for this issue, but customers will still experience slower speeds until the fibre cut issue is resolved.
We would like to thank all our customers for their continuing patience.