A Kátł’odeeche First Nation-based company says it has signed a deal giving it the materials to build a new NWT fibre line. Now, it needs the millions of dollars necessary to fund the work.
Katlotech boss Lyle Fabian says Noramco, a supplier of cables, has agreed to provide the cable that would connect High Level to KFN and the Hay River region if the project goes ahead.
Fabian says he is now “looking for federal government investment for us to put that fibre in the ground.”
Fibre-optic cable is what gives most NWT communities internet access. At the moment, that market is dominated by Northwestel.
However, many areas of the territory are served by only one line at present. If that line gets damaged or a wildfire burns through it, as has happened repeatedly in recent years, entire communities can lose their internet and phone connection to the outside world.
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While Northwestel is working on backup options to prevent that from happening again, Fabian says his Katlotech fibre line – a project he has pushed for years – would enable other internet service providers to offer competition to Northwestel, potentially bringing down the rates people pay.
He also sees his fibre line as a pathway for Indigenous nations to begin hosting physical data centres – collections of modular buildings that house the servers that act as “the cloud” when you save or transmit material online. That’s one reason why Fabian says Katlotech is pursuing a new fibre line rather than moving to technology like Starlink’s low-Earth orbit satellites.
“Data centre technology is going to be the key to the future of our infrastructure,” he said. “That is the reason why we are going in the direction that we’re going.
“Everybody else is building data centres. We believe that our data centres would complement Indigenous data sovereignty.
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“The Dene Nation and AFN are all talking about Indigenous data sovereignty … You need to own the physical infrastructure to transport that information, and you need a space to store it on Indigenous sovereign land.”
Fabian said he would not disclose the dollar value of Noramco’s cable contribution, nor the overall estimated cost of his fibre line project, which he envisages as the first phase of a much larger eventual network.
“What we need is investment from the feds,” he said.
“If the feds do not support what we’re doing, that’s fine. We have other partners and supporters who are willing to invest in this project – and so we will be putting out more press releases.”
