![](\"https:\/\/spectrum.ieee.org\/media-library\/an-aerial-photo-shows-utility-lines-stretching-across-a-river.jpg?id=67106655&width=1245&height=700&coordinates=0%2C187%2C0%2C188\")
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In February 2024, a young<\/strong> man lay somewhere on the frozen shore of James Bay, Canada, surrounded by snow and darkness, succumbing to hypothermia. When he failed to get home on time, his frantic mother sent a Facebook message to Elizabeth Kataquapit, then chief of the indigenous community Fort Albany First Nation<\/a> in northeastern Ontario. Kataquapit used Facebook to alert the community\u2019s search-and-rescue squad<\/a>, who jumped onto their snowmobiles and drove into the night. Before dawn, they returned with the dazed man, who told rescuers he\u2019d given up until wolves nudged his hypothermic body. \u201cThe wolves told him to wake up,\u201d Kataquapit says. \u201cI really believe they saved his life.\u201d<\/p>\n A fiber-optic network also played a key role.<\/p>\n Not long before the young man\u2019s mishap, the indigenous-owned Western James Bay Telecom Network<\/a> (WJBTN) had built its own fiber-to-the-home network in this remote Cree community, some 975 kilometers north of Toronto. Before the network, the rescue squad relied on a few handheld radios to pass information along. This time, a Facebook message to the full list of volunteers triggered the search.<\/p>\n Building Canada\u2019s first fully Indigenous-owned-and-operated fiber-optic network was an uphill battle for Brian Nakogee<\/a>, WJBTN\u2019s finance officer, who had to secure capital from agencies less familiar with the challenges of remote northern life. For the people of Fort Albany First Nation, accessing many vital supplies and services means traveling about 500 km to the regional city of Timmins. By land, the trip is possible for only a few weeks each winter, when the swampy tundra freezes hard enough to construct a temporary road. \u201cThe southern way of doing things is very different than how we here in remote areas piece things together,\u201d says Nakogee.<\/p>\n Telecommunications giants long saw little profit in serving the subarctic coast of James Bay. But even as satellite internet started to become available in remote communities, WJBTN staff saw the value in building and owning its own hard-wired internet service instead of relying on outside companies. Today, the nonprofit operates one of the fastest networks in Canada, while keeping both infrastructure ownership and revenue within the First Nations communities it serves.<\/p>\n WJBTN is part of a broader movement among Indigenous and remote communities seeking more control<\/a> over their telecommunications infrastructure. In the United States, 30 tribes<\/a> now operate fiber-to-the-home networks, many launched during COVID. Canada has since created a dedicated Indigenous broadband<\/a> funding stream. And as more communities pursue the expertise<\/a> and funding to build their own networks, WJBTN\u2019s experience offers a blueprint for what locally owned connectivity can look like in some of the hardest places to serve.<\/p>\n While many towns in North America were connecting to optical fiber in the early 2000s, the subarctic communities were left out.<\/p>\n The residents of Fort Albany saw the earliest sign of improvement in 2008. That\u2019s when their locally owned power company, Five Nations Energy Inc.<\/a> (FNEI), strung fiber-optic cable on the utility poles that were delivering electricity from the dusty railway town of Moosonee<\/a>, 135 km away across the peat bogs. On the shore of the Moose River, Moosonee is the last stop for Ontario\u2019s telecommunications providers. Its only link to the province\u2019s highways is a 5-hour train ride that shuttles passengers, freight, and vehicles through the Boreal forest.<\/p>\n Soon after, regional Cree leaders formed WJBTN to provide high-speed telecommunications in Moosonee and the three Indigenous communities to the north. WJBTN would lease the fiber-optic backbone from the power company, with just 1 gigabit per second of total capacity for the entire population of about 6,000 people.<\/p>\n But the new fiber backbone did not mean fast internet for residents. One of WJBTN\u2019s first commercial clients was a telecom company called Xittel<\/a>, which used microwave links and local access points to beam wireless internet to homes across each town. It wasn\u2019t what subscribers were hoping for. This system frustrated users with delays, glitches, and strict data caps. Kataquapit calls it a \u201cturtle.\u201d<\/p>\n Everybody complained about the wireless. Xittel advertised a 10 megabit-per-second connection, but speed tests consistently showed 3 Mb\/s for both uploads and downloads. And customers paid dearly if they ever exceeded their data limit. \u201cYou were billed close to CA $7 per megabit,\u201d Nakogee recalls.<\/p>\n WJBTN\u2019s dream had always been to connect everyone\u2019s home to fiber optic and make it affordable. Without a technical team, roads, or any major funding, the company just had to figure out how.<\/p>\n When Nakogee joined WJBTN in 2014, the telecom company was still in its infancy. It was \u201ca department huddled in the corner, trying to latch onto the services of FNEI,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Nakogee was asked to prepare a proposal to deliver 40 Mb\/s fiber connections to each of the roughly 1,000 homes and businesses spread across 300 km of the James Bay coast. Back then, WJBTN operated on revenue from its early commercial and institutional customers\u2014including Xittel, local government offices, hospitals, air navigation facilities, and family service centers that were connected to the first few strands of fiber. To make a residential fiber network possible, WJBTN first had to build both revenue and trust within the communities it hoped to serve; it had to convince people that the small new organization would follow through on its plan.<\/p>\n Nakogee especially needed support from Moosonee and Attawapiskat<\/a>, the communities at the start and the end of the line. \u201cThey\u2019re the bread that holds this sandwich together,\u201d he says. Through years of diplomacy, the budget grew enough to support a business proposal for a fiber-to-the-home network. Together with engineer Dirk MacLeod, in 2015 Nakogee began hashing out the details of a bare-bones version of the system. The plan required both upgrading the network\u2019s long-distance fiber backbone\u2014known in telecom as the backhaul<\/a>\u2014while also building the local infrastructure that would connect individual homes to the internet.<\/p>\n The first step was upgrading the network\u2019s backhaul using newer \u201ccoherent optics<\/a>\u201d technology, which can transmit much larger amounts of data over long distances, explains Dirk\u2019s brother, Andrew MacLeod, another network engineer, who joined as a consultant. Using equipment from telecom supplier Infinera<\/a>, the new backhaul would deliver 100 Gb\/s to distribution points in each town, with redundancy in case a fiber line failed.<\/p>\n Next came the challenge of connecting individual homes. Rather than extend a direct line from the central office for every customer, the engineers designed the network around a telecom architecture called GPON (Gigabit Passive Optical Network)<\/a>, which reduced the fiber needed to connect each customer to the network. Fiber from the backbone would run to networking equipment at each town\u2019s electrical substation, where passive optical splitters would distribute the connection among many households without requiring powered equipment at every junction. In remote communities where maintenance and repair are difficult, reducing the amount of active infrastructure was a necessity.<\/p>\n The total estimated cost was CA $4.7 million<\/a>, or CA $4,700 per household. By comparison, the Fiber Broadband Association<\/a> estimates that urban fiber-to-home construction in the United States costs the equivalent of about CA $1,400 to CA $1,800 per household<\/a>\u2014a stark contrast in expense.<\/p>\n A radio broadcast in 2018 heralded the good news: The fiber-to-home construction project was a go. Fort Albany mental health counselor Thomas Scott says he \u201ccouldn\u2019t wait.\u201d People seeking guidance for addiction or grief typically called him on landlines, and it was hard to help them over the phone without seeing their faces. Businesses, too, rejoiced\u2014including the Kataquapit family store, which relied on the phone system for transactions.<\/p>\n Winning approval for the project was one thing; building it across hundreds of kilometers of remote subarctic terrain was another.<\/p>\n Dirk MacLeod started with a schematic documenting the GPS position of every house, pole, and length of cable that would ultimately form the network. When WJBTN hired Montreal-based Fonex Data Systems<\/a> to upgrade the backhaul, the detailed plan made it easy for contractor Tasso Varvarikos to design the deployment. Still, tuning the optical system to operate reliably across transmission lines stretching hundreds of kilometers required extra care. \u201cOnce you go up north, there\u2019s no fiber store,\u201d he says,<\/p>\n To minimize surprises in the field, Varvarikos traveled to telecom supplier Infinera\u2019s laboratory in Stockholm, where he and other engineers assembled and tested the network before shipping it to the installation site. The Stockholm lab gave the team access to testing tools and technical specialists who helped configure the system before deployment in the remote fly-in communities. Using Infinera\u2019s simulation software, Varvarikos says he and his colleagues \u201ckicked the crap out of it in the lab\u201d until the network performed reliably.<\/p>\n Finally, in the spring of 2019, it was time to pack up and head to the sites. First, more than two pallets\u2019 worth of Infinera equipment were squeezed onto two charter aircraft in Timmins. Bush pilots, unfazed by the stringent logistics, made sure that one box reached Moosonee; the other one, Attawapiskat. Varvarikos says they packed extra fiber-optic transceivers, patch cables<\/a>, tools, and \u201cthe kitchen sink and then an extra sink just in case.\u201d By May, the team was ready to install the new backhaul\u2014a months-long process that necessarily preceded household connections. Once the equipment was in place, the engineers tested the network to make sure the systems in each community could communicate reliably and that data moved correctly across the backbone.<\/p>\n During the switchover to the new system, the MacLeod brothers worked from substations in different communities along the coast while Varvarikos coordinated from Fort Albany. Communicating over a spotty phone line, they started moving connections from the old network to the upgraded backhaul, carefully reconnecting cables and verifying that traffic still flowed correctly between communities. Within days, the anchor customers\u2014including hospitals, schools, and air-navigation systems\u2014were hardwired to a 100-Gb\/s backbone.<\/p>\n However, households were still relying on the slow legacy network. WJBTN\u2019s next step was flying huge reels of fiber-optic cable into the remote communities at enormous cost. Nakogee recalls cutting predetermined lengths of cable, then repackaging it onto spools to load onto cargo aircraft. The backbone was finally in place; now WJBTN had to bring fiber to every home.<\/p>\n Then, in a turn of events that rocked the communities, lead engineer Dirk MacLeod had a heart attack and died in July 2019. \u201cMy chest was ripped open,\u201d Nakogee says. The grieving company shut down for the summer.<\/p>\n WJBTN had intended to spend three summers training local crews from each community\u2019s power company to maintain and manage the network. After MacLeod\u2019s death, one line worker quietly took it upon himself to finish extending fiber to distribution points in Fort Albany. The team made a plan to begin connecting homes the following spring.<\/p>\n Then COVID<\/a> hit. Fearful and with limited medical facilities, the communities closed themselves off. Nobody was allowed in.<\/p>\n \u201cCOVID really screwed things up,\u201d says Andrew MacLeod. People were screaming for better internet, he recalls, but they wouldn\u2019t let outsiders in. So instead of training local crews and building each town\u2019s network simultaneously as planned, WJBTN made a tantalizing offer: The first community to allow MacLeod in would have its fiber-to-the-home network completed first. Fort Albany jumped on it.<\/p>\n Peyton Reuben, a recent computer systems graduate in Fort Albany, was seeking a new job when his cousin mentioned that there was a \u201cfiber guy\u201d in town. Reuben\u2019s coursework covered coding and how routers and ISPs communicate\u2014a distant relative to Andrew MacLeod\u2019s hands-on infrastructure work.<\/p>\n \u201cThey were looking for helpers to splice fiber,\u201d says Reuben, something he knew nothing about. Nonetheless, he started work the day he met MacLeod and got a crash course in building an aerial fiber network<\/a>, running cables from utility poles into neighborhood connection boxes that ultimately served individual homes. The fun part was reaching every pole in every neighborhood in a town crisscrossed by tributaries of the Albany River. \u201cWe didn\u2019t have a bucket truck, so we had to climb up the poles,\u201d says Reuben. \u201cIt was quite the experience, going through thick brush and thigh-deep water.\u201d<\/p>\n The hard part was splicing the fiber\u2014fusing together hair-thin glass strands that connected homes to the larger network. Inside each connection box, distribution fibers had to be joined to cables leading to individual houses, one strand at a time\u2014around 150 in each box. Reuben\u2019s first attempt \u201clooked like a plate of spaghetti,\u201d says MacLeod. More splicing waited back at the substation, where optical splitters connected neighborhood lines to the town\u2019s central GPON equipment. \u201cIt took me four times as long as Andrew to complete a splice tray back then,\u201d says Reuben.<\/p>\n Slowly but surely, every building in Fort Albany saw a strand of fiber drop from overhead and come through a box drilled into the wall, ready to connect to a router. By springtime, aerial cables linked every house\u2014and future building sites\u2014to the substation. Reuben calls it \u201ca spider web that goes everywhere across town.\u201d<\/p>\n Without much fanfare, on a night in April 2022, WJBTN flipped the switch in Fort Albany<\/a>. The next morning, Kataquapit woke up to a different world. With 250 Mb\/s download and 30 Mb\/s upload speeds, she found herself just a click away from her children in faraway cities.<\/p>\n MacLeod and Reuben continued working up the coast, splicing cables and adding connection boxes. As COVID eased, they hired more local help, and the power company lent a hand with bucket trucks. \u201cWe were working 12 hours a day, 7 days a week,\u201d says MacLeod. \u201cGuys were sitting in the heat, in bucket trucks, learning on the fly how to do splicing.\u201d By late 2022, the network reached every home.<\/p>\n Around that time, Starlink<\/a>\u2019s satellite internet service was becoming widely available. Many of WJBTN\u2019s potential clients asked why they shouldn\u2019t just purchase that instead of a fiber-optic connection that involved drilling into their homes. But speed tests comparing Xittel, Starlink, and the new WJBTN connections showed a major difference in latency: In applications like video calls, Xittel and Starlink\u2019s round-trip signal delays became painfully obvious. Unlike satellite systems, fiber networks don\u2019t need to send signals hundreds of kilometers into orbit and back. That gave WJBTN a significant performance advantage.<\/p>\n MacLeod recalls a conversation with one line worker who wanted to turn to Starlink. \u201cWe told him our latency is so much better,\u201d MacLeod says, explaining that ISPs measure performance by both bandwidth and latency. From Attawapiskat, a data packet traveling over WJBTN\u2019s fiber network reached Toronto in 20 milliseconds. Comparable satellite connections took closer to 60 milliseconds<\/a>. And Xittel\u2019s latency was much worse, at several hundred milliseconds. (Since then, WJBTN has reduced latency further, to about 12 milliseconds.)<\/p>\n The team\u2019s success has bolstered other Indigenous broadband companies. WJBTN representatives have shared their experiences at Indigenous Connectivity Summits<\/a> since 2017, and how-to workshops have sprung up across Canada<\/a> (and the United States<\/a>). And Canada has since created a dedicated broadband funding stream for Indigenous communities. Within Fonex Data Systems, the company hired to do the backbone work, the WJBTN implementation is now considered the model for a successful installation in a remote location.<\/p>\n Nakogee says ownership remains the key advantage. Unlike earlier telecom providers that leased infrastructure or delivered service wirelessly, WJBTN owns the backbone fiber, the right-of-way, and the poles carrying the network. That makes it far harder for outside telecom companies to displace the service. \u201cThat\u2019s our secret weapon,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Fundamentally, it\u2019s about sovereignty. By controlling the infrastructure that carries internet traffic, the communities can govern and maintain the network according to their own priorities rather than the financial goals of distant providers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"An](\"https:\/\/spectrum.ieee.org\/media-library\/an-aerial-photo-shows-a-grid-of-residential-streets-surrounded-by-forest.jpg?id=67101631&width=980\")
An aerial view shows the remote community of Fort Albany in northern Ontario.<\/small>Gavin John <\/small><\/p>\nHow a Power Line Became a Broadband Backbone<\/h2>\n
![\"Person](\"https:\/\/spectrum.ieee.org\/media-library\/person-in-gray-cap-and-maroon-hoodie-looking-thoughtfully-to-the-side.jpg?id=67101714&width=980\")
<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/spectrum.ieee.org\/media-library\/a-photo-that-shows-the-screen-of-a-cellphone-displaying-the-words-u201cfort-albany-search-rescue-u201d.jpg?id=67101713&width=980\")
Elizabeth Kataquapit [top], former chief of Fort Albany First Nation, says high-speed internet has transformed her community. Search & Rescue volunteers now coordinate emergency responses through a Facebook group [bottom]. <\/small>Gavin John <\/small><\/p>\nDesigning a Fiber Network for the James Bay Coast<\/h2>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/spectrum.ieee.org\/media-library\/a-photo-shows-a-man-holding-a-laptop-and-sitting-in-an-office-in-front-of-a-large-computer-monitor.jpg?id=67101840&width=980\")
WJBTN finance officer Brian Nakogee played a key role in financing and planning the community-owned fiber network.<\/small> Gavin John <\/small><\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/spectrum.ieee.org\/media-library\/a-man-in-an-office-points-to-something-on-a-large-piece-of-paper-spread-before-him.jpg?id=67101809&width=980\")
Andrew MacLeod, WJBTN\u2019s field project manager, reviews a map of the fiber network.<\/small>Gavin John<\/small><\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/spectrum.ieee.org\/media-library\/a-man-in-an-orange-baseball-hat-stands-next-to-a-boat-with-an-outboard-motor-in-front-of-a-house.jpg?id=67101804&width=980\")
Fort Albany resident Thomas Scott says high-speed internet has improved his work as a mental health counselor.<\/small> Gavin John <\/small><\/p>\nTesting and Deploying a Remote Fiber Network<\/h2>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/spectrum.ieee.org\/media-library\/a-map-of-northern-ontario-shows-the-location-of-moosonee-fort-albany-kashechewan-and-attawapiskat-along-the-western-shore-of.png?id=67107300&width=980\")
The Western James Bay Telecom Network connects remote communities along the western shore of James Bay in northern Ontario.<\/small>Chris Philpot<\/small><\/p>\nTraining a Local Fiber Crew<\/h2>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/spectrum.ieee.org\/media-library\/a-photo-shows-the-streets-of-a-town-with-utility-poles-carrying-many-wires.jpg?id=67101770&width=980\")
Utility poles carry power and fiber-optic lines through Fort Albany First Nation.<\/small>Gavin John<\/small><\/p>\n![\"Person](\"https:\/\/spectrum.ieee.org\/media-library\/person-in-glasses-looks-up-smiling-outside-on-a-sunny-day-near-small-houses.jpg?id=67102051&width=980\")
<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/spectrum.ieee.org\/media-library\/a-photo-shows-a-man-standing-on-a-street-and-looking-up-at-a-utility-pole.jpg?id=67102049&width=980\")
WJBTN network coordinator Peyton Reuben looks up at the overhead fiber network in Fort Albany [top]. A splice enclosure joins fiber-optic cables at a distribution point [bottom]. <\/small>Gavin John<\/small><\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/spectrum.ieee.org\/media-library\/a-photo-shows-a-bucket-truck-with-a-man-in-the-bucket-approaching-the-top-of-a-utility-pole.jpg?id=67101766&width=980\")
A worker installs a new fiber-optic line for the Western James Bay Telecom Network.<\/small>Gavin John<\/small><\/p>\nWhy Not Starlink?<\/h2>\n
![\"Hand](\"https:\/\/spectrum.ieee.org\/media-library\/hand-adjusting-fiber-optic-cables-in-a-labeled-network-equipment-panel.jpg?id=67102064&width=980\")
<\/p>\n![\"Network](\"https:\/\/spectrum.ieee.org\/media-library\/network-server-rack-with-labeled-fiber-optic-cables-and-glowing-status-leds.jpg?id=67102061&width=980\")
<\/p>\n![\"Weathered](\"https:\/\/spectrum.ieee.org\/media-library\/weathered-wooden-cable-reels-with-exposed-black-wire-yellow-wall-and-person-in-background.jpg?id=67102053&width=980\")
Fiber-optic cables and networking equipment inside the Fort Albany substation distribute internet service throughout the community [top, middle]. Large spools of fiber-optic cable were flown in to connect homes [bottom]. <\/small>Gavin John<\/small><\/p>\nHow Fiber Changed Daily Life<\/h2>\n