As of September 30th, 2025, Raincoast Networks serves the 347 remaining customers in what was once the Twincomm service area on Cortes Island. Mascon by Telus acquired Twincomm in 2022. 

“I come from Savary Island. We provide internet to those who have decided to live off grid and in remote communities and cannot be served well by other telecom providers, majors and things from space, explained Oliver Linsley, owner of Raincoast Networks.

“We’ve been doing this for eight years and we service areas from Howe Sound all the way to Cortes. It has been a wonderful adventure, mainly because I get to meet some fantastic people in places I didn’t even know existed. We’ve helped communities up and down the coast, and that’s where we got our pride from. It’s not from a paycheck (laughs), I can tell you that, but it definitely is from the fact that I can go to someone’s house and they have baked cookies for me. They’re just super happy that we came in a boat and we’ve driven across a whole bunch of crazy oceans and we’re at their house and we’re going to fix it.”

Cortes Currents: How did you get into Cortes Island? 

Oliver Linsley: “Into Cortes was an interesting situation. I have been dealing with major telecom companies since we started. In the beginning, it was a very positive situation where they were very interested in working with people like me as last mile providers, so they did not have to extend their networks out at a cost they did not like. Telecom likes density because it maximizes their investment. So they partnered up with me and we began working at these remote places. As COVID hit, the demand skyrocketed and the government came around and gave them money, and we began competing with Major Telecom (Mascon by Telus).” 

“Major Telecom decided that they went too far. They had purchased Twincommm from Mark Torrance on Twin Islands. After two years of owning that, it had served its purpose to them, and they no longer wanted the asset and the customers here on Cortes. They approached me and asked me if I wanted to take over the network. Over the course of about a year and, for various reasons, I said ‘no I don’t think so.’ In the end, I decided that Cortes was a wonderfully remote community with demand that I wanted to be a part of. So after a long, long period of negotiations, we ended up picking up Cortes, about 350 customers on the island and we just acquired it as of today, I believe.” 

Cortes Currents: Are you talking about 350 active customers?

Oliver Linsley: “347 active customers on Cortes. I believe it is the count. Basically it’s what’s left from Twincomm that City West didn’t take, and those also who didn’t go to Starlink.”

“I am here this week to see all the parts of the network: all the access points; meet all the people who host the network; make sure everyone’s happy; to identify problems in the network; UPSs that don’t work; hardware that needs to be upgraded. We’d like to actually talk to customers who have issues and they can explain to me in person what they think is going on so that we have an idea how to fix their situation moving forward.”

Cortes Currents: What are you offering?

Oliver Linsley: “We basically offer the same service that Twincommm did. We are very community based. We are looking to pick up a tech here on the island. We like to keep customer service, which is something very rare in rural places, as fast as possible. So if your system goes awry one day, perhaps we can actually get to you in one day or the next day as opposed to some of the situations where you get with other providers where they just don’t have a presence in the community. We really pride ourselves. in being there to keep people online, because most of the time it’s quite an easy fix.” 

“So we are offering wireless services that most people are already hooked up to are already operating. They’re operating the same way as TwinComm built them the same way as Mascon was running them. We are going to optimize the network. Essentially it’s very similar to what Twincomm was, but we’ll be upgrading. Pricing should be the same. The speed should be faster.” 

Cortes Currents: Tell me about your prices and your speeds. 

Oliver Linsley: “Currently on Raincoast our drop app is 50 down, 10 up (50/10 Megabits per second, or Mbps). We offer that through all of our networks. We have a mid plan, which is 20/5, and then we have a low plan, which is 5/2. it’s all on the website.” 

Cortes Currents: “On the website it said $130 for the 50/10 plan, $95 for the 20/5 plan, and $60 for the 5/2 plan. We talked about 50/10, but what kind of data did you get for that? 

Oliver Linsley: “Unlimited.” 

Cortes Currents: Okay and for the $95 (20/5)? 

Oliver Linsley: “For the $95, currently it’s 150, but Twincommm slash Mascon has a plan that’s very similar in price, at the same speed, and that is unlimited. I believe our mid plan is going to go unlimited too, just to match that. Everybody likes unlimited data.”

Cortes Currents: Your cheapest plan is 5/2. 

Oliver Linsley: “Yes.” 

Cortes Currents: I’m just trying to think, at what point would Netflix freeze?

Oliver Linsley: “It freezes at about 3 Mbps, 5 Mbps is fine.”

Cortes Currents: “Yes, but it’s not 5 Mbps consistantly. You get a lot of people on the line and all of a sudden it drops.” 

Oliver Linsley: “If you have a 5/3 plan your dish possibly will have actually a 200 Megabit connection on paper, probably more like 120 Mbps in a maximized situation. So you’re actually only taking a small portion of the bandwidth available. Every part of the network will have a speed rating for it. So as it bounces through different points, more and more data can accumulate. Netflix will work at 5 Megabits. You’re not going to get 4K (resolution). If you don’t have a giant tv, it’s fine, but you will consume the data. Our slowest plan has a data cap on it, 50 gigabytes (GB) a month. 

Cortes Currents: Let’s say you were watching Netflix. How much would that work out to? 

Oliver Linsley: “Netflix on its lowest setting? Lowest quality, which is okay, is around 300 to 500 megabytes an hour as you get up to a reasonable quality. You are looking more like a gig an hour, and if you want to get into the HD 4K, it’s multiple gigs an hour. You can tune it in so that it won’t consume a huge pile of data and if you’re not a real cinephile, you’re going to be just fine.”

“If you want to watch Netflix and you want it to look good, the mid plan is just fine.”

“We have seasonal pricing that changes everything. We understand that people aren’t here 12 months a year. So instead of doing a vacation disconnect, which I know Twincommm offered, we give people a 35% discount off the rate but we bill it all year round. That’s to keep our cash flow consistent because a variable cash flow is difficult because our expenses are fixed. So how that works, let’s say for our top plan. First from Easter to Thanksgiving, it’s your normal 50/10 unlimited speed and after Thanksgiving, back to Easter in the off season, it’s the same speed You’re always online, 50/10, but we give you a data allowance. You get 150 gigs over the winter.”

“So if you want to come up for a couple weekends, over Christmas or whatever, you’re online. You’re not disconnected, but we are taking that data away from you and we’re giving you a 35% discount off of it.” 

Cortes Currents: Speaking as a former customer, Twincommm had one home advantage, and that was they were local – so everyone was very forgiving of them, but they also had aging infrastructure, which would go down a lot.

Oliver Linsley: “They do, and I have personally, in the last month gone through every single radio on this network on the island, as well as every single client radio and analyzed the situation of what looks good on paper or in the system and what doesn’t. I’ve seen a lot of backhauls and pieces of technology that are several generations old, not that they don’t work.”

“They can work a lot better with newer pieces and we’ll be looking at upgrading. We want to get the system to a place where there’s no reason to move somewhere else because it works functionally for everybody’s needs. Zoom calls, high definition Netflix, your children with all their tablets and discord servers and everything they want to do. We can provide enough bandwidth for those people.”

Cortes Currents: What happened last week, you had an outage? 

Oliver Linsley: “We did have an outage last week. That happened in Jervis Inlet where they were replacing the high tension wires and that was a planned outage for a day that took out all of basically the upper coast to Cortes. Then when the power came back on, a tree had fallen down over the power lines on Cortes, which instantly took out Cortes for another day. At that point we discovered that all the battery backup systems that were in place to work when there was a power outage failed. The batteries were old, there wasn’t enough power.”

“Recently in Whaletown where they were doing work on the dock, around four o’clock something happened in the power system and that tripped the circuit breaker. The UPS in the box that feeds the Whaletown tower is old. The batteries lasted for, we’re thinking about 30 minutes. Then the batteries died, which took down the tower. We had someone  hit the reset on the UPS battery system. The batteries died in three minutes. Again, she went back out, noticed the circuit breaker had flipped on the UPS, reset that and it came back up. As we hadn’t actually gotten around to looking at that tower in Whaletown, we were really flying blind on it. To us, it was just something in the digital sphere on a network. Now we’re aware that it has some broken pieces.”

Cortes Currents: Now I want to do a backtrack to about four years ago. Twincomm at that time had enough reserves that you could run between 9 and 12 hours without electricity. The backup would keep going. That stopped. Are we going to see a return to that kind of a situation? 

Oliver Linsley: “Yes. We have already heard that about 50% of the battery backup systems on the island were looked at by Mascon by Telus, and simply thrown out. I’m under the impression that it wasn’t quite garbage yet, and if they had done some maintenance and maybe replaced the batteries, they would’ve continued to work.”

“We figure that over the next little while we will be replacing all the non functioning units, so that you will get 10 to 12 hours of backup time if there is a power outage.” 

“Recently, when the big power outage happened on the upper coast from the Jervis Inlet work, we kept most of the network online – except for the people who were actually affected by the power outage. Everybody on Savary Island, whose data comes from Lund, were all kept online even though Powell River and Lund were out. Telus was actually down, including their cellular service. We still had connectivity because we have a gateway in Egmont. So all the data from all the North Network just simply ran down our system to Egmont where the power was in. We did not experience a network outage during that massive downtime, which we felt was great: Good job, Raincoast!”(Laughter)

Cortes Currents: You also still have competition from CityWest, which is faster (though a lot of people are upset because CityWest did not connect them). 

Oliver Linsley: “Let’s just talk about the facts. Yes, fibre optics are wonderful. That is the future. That is the data pipeline for the world and there is no way that I would ever tell anyone that if they’re getting a fibre optic line to their house, that we’re better. If it’s built properly, it is a great way to get data and at high speeds.”

“I will tell people though that fibre optics are not a feasible option financially for any telecom company in the wilderness as CityWest discovered when they came to Cortes. This is from someone I know who works at CityWest who did the install, ‘We didn’t quite realize that there was so much granite, which is tough to bury in, and we didn’t take into account the length of everyone’s driveways.’ CityWest’s build is half done because it cost twice as much money as they expected.”

“I’m not technically adept enough to really comment professionally over what they built and how they built it, but I know it is incredibly different than other telecoms in the size and scope and durability of the cable that they used. The cable they put under the water is very thin. It’s about the thickness of your thumb. The cable that other telecom companies use on sea floors is about the thickness of an elephant trunk (See photo above). My understanding is that the Citywest cable has broken several times this year, which is a cause for concern because I don’t think TELUS is or any other company’s’ subsea cable has broken this year.”

“So yes, CityWest has come to many islands. They have variable performances on each island, but if you do get it and you do get hooked up to it and it stays online, it’s a wonderful way to get internet but, I believe, very, very expensive to do in the middle of nowhere, it is hard to recoup.”

Cortes Currents: Is there anything you want to add?

Oliver Linsley: “I was just in Vancouver a couple days ago and I just couldn’t wait to leave.”

“I got here and everyone’s calm and people love the outdoors. They love their life here, and it doesn’t have that stress. I’m really happy to be here. It’s a really neat community. I have some memories of Cortes. We used to go to Cortes Bay, to that fish and chip burger hut that was on top of the hill when I was a kid, when the Coast Guard station were there. I remember being in Gorge Harbour. We were salmon fishing for a weekend back when I was really young.”

“All of these islands have wonderful people and wonderful communities and heck, you guys have a cool radio station. That’s amazing. It reinforces the fact that this is a world that I love to be in.”

“I really appreciate the people who put the effort into living in a space like this because I grew up on Savary Island and that was a lot of work. It’s gotten easier over the years, but I really enjoy that world and that lifestyle and the solitude and the quietness and having the internet really changed that too, where the winters weren’t quite so dangerously isolating.” (Laughter)

Cortes Currents: What’s the best way for people to contact you? 

Oliver Linsley: “Call us or send us an email or you can send us a text. The phone number for the office is 236-239-5096. You will be talking to a lovely woman named Cat Cameron. She’s on Savary Island. She’s our client manager. You can also send us a text to that number, we will always look at texts 24 hours a day, as long as someone’s awake to look at it. Or you can send us an email to info@rainsnetworks.com.”

Links of Interest:

• Raincoast Networks webpage
• Citywest on Cortes Island
• Articles about, or mentioning, Mascon by Telus

All undesignated photos courtesy Raincoast Networks

To receive an emailed catalogue of articles on Cortes Currents, send a (blank) email to subscribe to your desired frequency:

Weekly Digest cortescurrents – cortescurrents-weekly+subscribe@cortes.groups.io

Daily, (articles posted during the last 24 hours) – cortescurrents-daily+subscribe@cortes.groups.io