Northwestel promises 'detailed investigation' into weekend outage, as business owners voice frustration

Each time there is an internet outage, James Maltby's business loses money.

"There's been a number of outages this year, more than I can even count," Maltby said. "It's frustrating for me as a business owner." 

Maltby is the owner of Woodcutter's Blanket, a restaurant in Whitehorse. When the latest in a string of recent telecommunications outages and disruptions occurred on Sunday, he was forced to keep his doors closed. 

Another outage earlier this summer occurred during his restaurant's dinner service. Many of the bills from that evening were never paid.

"We were full and the internet went down again. And so we were unable to take any payments," Maltby said. "So usually we take numbers and email addresses and just kind of hope that people will come back. In this particular instance, I think we got about 80 per cent of our bills paid for."

Maltby is now on a waitlist for StarLink. He fears outages like these will keep happening and his business will continue to lose money.

"I have no doubt in my mind that Northwestel will go down again," Maltby said. 

Northwestel investigating outage

Spokesperson Matthew Bossons says Northwestel is conducting a "detailed investigation" into Sunday's outage, which saw disruptions in landline calling, cellular service, internet, and TV in the Yukon, as well as local and long-distance calling in Nunavut and the N.W.T.

"When something like this happens, these sites generally switch to back-up power sources such as generators and batteries," Bossons said. "Obviously, that didn't happen in this case."

Bossons says Northwestel is working to find out why the redundancies failed. 

He also said a lack of back-up fibre lines in the North is to blame for the frequency of outages in recent months.

A power failure at a northern B.C. site caused Sunday's outage. 

"We're in a remote and rugged corner of Canada," Bossons said. "A lot of communities have one fibre connection going in and if that gets cut…it can have an immediate, unfortunate impact."

The Dempster Fibre Project is currently underway to address the lack of back-up fibre lines. The project, expected to be completed by the end of the year, will keep customers connected to the internet in the event that a fibre line is cut.

"If the Dempster Fibre Project was completed now, the outage that was experienced by northerners on Sunday would have probably been non-existent," Bossons said.

Northerners who are concerned about the recent outages can file an online complaint to the Commission for Complaints for Telecom-television Services (CCTS). 

Josée Thibault, the assistant commissioner of operations and business services at CCTS, said the commission has not received a high number of complaints about internet outages in the North. However, northerners should know that they have the right to file a complaint, she said.

"They have the right to recourse to get help with the CCTS," said Thibault. "It's extremely important that customers are aware of that because we're extremely effective in being able to help those customers. About nine times out of 10, complaints get resolved."

For now, northerners like Maltby remain frustrated. 

"In April when we shut down for multiple days with no cell service…that was a scary time," Maltby said. "To think that in this day and age we can be in that scenario is mind-boggling."