CityWest started hooking Cortes Island residents up to the internet in December 2023, but many homes are still waiting. As the evidence is anecdotal, it is difficult to say how many people are currently connected through CityWest and how many are not.

Sherman Barker just informed me that he has never met anyone who is connected. After waiting for two years of waiting, he was using Starlink by the time a CityWest crew showed up to do the final hook-up. 

“I have a pile of CityWest cable, all the way from my driveway to my yard, that they don’t want back.”  

Sean Coyote, a techie who works for Cortes Community Radio, said typically people who have yet to be serviced are told their names are on a list. Some, like Sherman, subsequently moved on to other internet providers. Sean added that there are a couple of CityWest trucks working on the island right now. 

This was confirmed by Ann Mortifee, from Tiber Bay, who informed me she wasn’t connected last year. I asked for an update on her status earlier this week.

Ann emailed a response on January 23, “Someone from CityWest stopped by recently, just to look over our equipment. It didn’t give a date or anything (for when she’d be hooked up), but it appears they’re on the move again.”

When Dino Tsakonas was CityWest’s Regional Manager for our area (2021-early 2024), it was easy to set up interviews. Since he left, we have been dealing with a friendly but largey unresponsive office in Prince Rupert.

My colleague De Clarke and I have been asking CityWest for an interview for over a year. 

As they do not have a media line, I usually phone the technical department (1-800-442-8664). During a typical conversation, a month or so ago, I asked about the connectivity problem. The CityWest employee stated he was under the impression that ALL of their customers on Cortes Island are hooked up. He promised that someone with more information would contact me, but that did not happen. It seldom does.

One of the exceptions occured on March 11, 2024, when Wes Eisses, VP of Projects, promised De he would find someone to speak about the Cortes Island project. He did not follow up on that.

I was able to interview Scott Simpson, Senior Marketing Manager later that month, after someone cut the cable CityWest was laying in Whaletown in 17 places.

My last attempt to contact CityWest took place on Friday, January 17, 2025. I left a message and, as of this posting, they have yet to return my call. 

Andy Vine informed me he was among the first Cortes residents to sign up, but is still waiting for CityWest to connect him. 

“Fiber optic has a lot of appeal to us budget conscious islanders. That’s why I signed up with CityWest. Unfortunately it’s now 3 years later and I still don’t have service. Basically they have broken every promise and missed every date. I have very little faith left that they will deliver eventually. Meanwhile I am with MASCON, a Telus subsidiary, which bought Twincomm. The new service is cheaper but we pay for service calls and it’s not fiber optic.”

He lives in Mansons Landing and was the tenth household to inform me they have not been connected. The others are in Whaletown, Squirrel Cove and Tiber Bay.

De Clarke is among them. She lives in Whaletown and, on Sunday, January 19, 2025, emailed, “Our fiber goes from the street to the house, it’s just waiting to be spliced into the main cable that runs along the road. As I know, no one on Whaletown Road has connectivity yet.  I last saw the CityWest rep — gee, months ago.  We had to sign up AGAIN because they had somehow lost their customer signup records during a transition from one contractor to another.  I never did get the whole story on what happened with that first contractor.  At that time — might have been last Sept? — they said they expected to finish up the job “in the Spring” (2024).  I have seen the splicing truck around from time to time (a trailer really, not a standalone truck) so they are doing something.” 

She mentioned a couple down by the Whaletown dock who signed up with Starlink, adding “I refuse to give Elon Musk a penny, so I am stubbornly waiting for fiber.”

CityWest has hooked up at least one house on the other end of Whaletown Road, in Squirrel Cove. I have been connected since January 2024. Speaking as a customer for the past year: There have been some technical issues, the worst being when the service went down for several days last November, but overall I find CityWest’s product to be much faster and more reliable than what I experienced with Twincomm. (Where Twincomm excelled was communicating with the public, they usually responded to calls within minutes and, in my experience, never more than two hours.)

This is the result of a speed test showing how well CityWest works on my computer, done through Ookla on January 21, 2025: 

Here are the results of a speed test when I using Twincomm (which connected to TELUS) on January 23, 2024:

However at least two neighbouring Squirrel Cove households who asked not to be identified have given up on waiting for CityWest and gone to other internet providers. 

So has Tom Bohart, another Squirrel Cove resident, who wrote, “Between Christmas and New Year’s last year (ie – Jan 1, 2024), Dino brought a nice young man down my driveway. He was working for CityWest and signed me up for a contract. He gave me a date and time when someone would bring fiber down my driveway and hook me up to CityWest internet.” 

“This was supposed to happen four or five times over the years, but It always turned out to be someone who thought I already had the fiber to my house. I don’t. Each time I asked them to tell someone I don’t have fiber, but being a communication company, they have no way to communicate with each other, it seems. I have also signed a contract four times already.” 

“Anyhow, the day came and went and no-one showed up. I left Dino a message. He called back and said he’d been laid off, sorry about that. I called their 1-800 number (again) and a nice young woman said she would call the crew working in Whaletown and tell them. To my surprise someone running that crew showed up a few days later. I showed him the connection box at the end of my driveway. There was a fiber cable buried under my driveway that ran through the woods above ground to my neighbour’s power shed, but nothing down my driveway. He looked sympathetic, left and never came back.”

His wife, Laurel Bohart, added, “We’re on xplore until that expires then we have no idea what to do, except Starlink.”

Out of curiosity, Cortes Currents asked Regional Director Robyn Mawhinny about CityWest’s progress on Quadra Island. She has seen their truck a couple of times but, as far as she knows, no one has been hooked up or even given the opportunity to sign a contract.  

Links of Interest:

• Articles about, or mentioning, CityWest on Cortes Island
• Articles about, or mentioning, CityWest on Quadra
• Articles about, or mentioning, CityWest on Denman
• Articles about, or mentioning, CityWest on Hornby
• CityWest website
• Articles about Twincomm (which was purchased by Mascon by Telus in June 30, 2022)
• Articles about, or mentioning, Mascon by Telus
• Mascon by Telus website
• Starlink website
• Articles mentioning Xplornet
• Xplore (previously named Xplornet) website

Changes: As the only voice in this podcast is mine, I did not decide to make a radio version and podcast until the story had been up for several hours.

All undesignated photos by Roy L Hales

Alterations: Ann Mortifee was away when I asked for an update and her reply did not arrive until January 23, two days after the rest of the story was published.

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