08/05/2026
Statement from Every-Day Computers Inc. on the August 2 Fibre Cut in Northwest B.C.
Terrace, B.C.
August 5, 2026
On Sunday, August 2, telecommunications cables running along the Highway 16 corridor near Mount Hayes were deliberately cut. Within minutes, internet, cellular, television, and home phone service went dark across northwest British Columbia, from Terrace and Kitimat to Prince Rupert, Smithers, Fraser Lake, Haida Gwaii, and Bella Bella. Ev-Com's customers were among those affected, because like every provider in this region, our traffic depends on the same long-haul fibre that was severed. Service was largely restored late that night, and we thank our customers for their patience through a disruption that was not of their making, or ours.
We want to be direct about what this outage revealed, and what we intend to do about it.
The core problem is that the entire northwest depends on a single route. Nearly all connectivity into and out of this region travels one long-haul fibre path along the Highway 16 and Skeena corridor. When that one path is cut, it does not matter which company you buy your service from. The whole region goes down at once. This is not hypothetical. On May 4 of this year, an almost identical cable cut near Burns Lake took the region offline for roughly fifteen hours, including 911 landline service. A landslide in 2020 and fallen trees since have done the same. TELUS itself reported a 45 percent increase in total thefts of its infrastructure in 2025, and a 23 percent surge in copper cable theft specifically. The pattern is clear, it is growing, and no single act of vandalism should be able to sever an entire region.
A small carrier cannot close a national-scale infrastructure gap alone. But we can lead, and we can push. Here is our plan.
1. Build redundancy through diverse carrier agreements.
We are actively pursuing additional transport and wholesale agreements so that Ev-Com's network no longer rides a single path. If one route fails, our customers stay connected on another. Reducing our dependence on any one provider's cable is the fastest protection we can put in place, and it is already underway.
2. Advocate for a second, physically diverse fibre route, and apply for it now.
We are calling on the CRTC, through its Broadband Fund, to prioritize transport resiliency for northwest B.C.: a second, physically separate fibre route serving the Kitimat, Terrace, and Prince George corridor, hardened with monitoring cameras and ground-disturbance sensors so that tampering is detected before service is lost. The Broadband Fund's current call for applications closes August 13, 2026, and Ev-Com intends to be at that table.
3. Put diverse fibre on the North Coast Transmission Line corridor.
BC Hydro is building the North Coast Transmission Line, a new 500-kilovolt line from Prince George to Terrace, and its own project scope already includes adding fibre-optic cable on the transmission structures across both phases, to modernize BC Hydro's own communications. We are asking BC Hydro and the Province to provision that build with spare, diverse fibre capacity that the carriers serving this region can access. Utilities routinely lease unused strands on their transmission fibre; here, that spare capacity would give the northwest a physically separate path, high on the towers and far harder to cut than the buried cables that keep failing.
4. Add satellite as a backbone safety net.
We are incorporating agreements with satellite providers to give Ev-Com's core network an independent backup path, so that even a total loss of terrestrial fibre cannot fully isolate our customers.
Northwest B.C. deserves connectivity that does not collapse the moment one cable is cut. Our residents, our businesses, our health services, and our emergency responders all depend on it. Ev-Com is committed to being part of the fix, not another company waiting for the same trench to be dug up again.
Baljinder Basra
CEO, Every-Day Computers Inc.
Toll-Free: (855) 203-1372 | [email protected]
