By Tristin Hopper
Somewhere in Northern Alberta last week, a rogue backhoe operator ploughed through a fiber optic cable. It’s only a few inches wide – no bigger than the outlet pipes under your kitchen sink. Yet this unassuming cable is the Yukon’s sole ground-based connection to the web. Once cut, Northwestel’s network reverts to a backup grid of 1990s-era microwave towers. Cell phone networks crash, the internet grinds to a snail’s pace and long distance calls become a crap-shoot.
It was the third time in a week. Twice before, Alberta workmen had severed our precious cable - presumably ignorant to the fact that an entire territory was now violently cursing their name.
It’s becoming a Yukon tradition. Every summer, a gauntlet of forest fires or incautiously-wielded heavy equipment will leave us with at least a few days of dead cell phones and 1993-style bandwidth. Many moons ago, when I was a mere reporter for the Yukon News, I drove out to the site of just such an incident. A crew was doing upgrades to an Alaska Highway bridge, and just before ground was broken, a Northwestel representative diligently traveled to the site to mark out the location of the cable using a series of bright red flags.
The flags might as well have said “dig right here.” When I showed up, a backhoe had scooped a ragged trench right through the center of the flags. and a team of Northwestel engineers were feverishly weaving their tattered cable back together. As I drove away, a foreman with bad teeth blocked my exit. He nonchalantly leaned on my driver’s side door and – with a gust of burrito-breath – suggested that it was a “bad idea” if I printed the name of his company. He was right to be afraid. If the Chamber of Commerce had ever found out his backhoe operator’s home address they would have put his head on a pike.
Now, while it would be fun to blame Northwestel for all these outages, this is one of the few situations in which they are innocent. Still, that doesn’t shield them from absorbing most of the blame. Northwestel’s Whitehorse headquarters is a virtual fortress; they won’t even let you into the lobby until you’ve identified yourself through a grainy intercom. At the utility’s downtown retail store, posted signs remind patrons not to spit, scream or swear at the clerks.
Rather than get mad, however, I suggest we see these outages as nothing more than a folksy Northern reality. One hundred years ago, a snowstorm could hold up the mail for weeks. Nowadays, a hungover construction worker can wreak havoc with our mobile networks. Twenty minutes to transit a single email? Welcome to the last frontier.
(Just as I neared the final keystroke on this blog, my office was suddenly plunged into darkness by a power outage.)
