Dark Fibre & Unactivated
Broadband Infrastructure in Canada
Causes, Case Studies, and Policy Implications
April 2026
This report examines the phenomenon of built-but-unactivated ('dark') fibre-optic infrastructure across Canada. Despite billions of dollars in public investment in broadband connectivity, significant quantities of installed fibre remain unlit — unused, underused, or inaccessible to communities that nominally sit adjacent to it. This report identifies the structural, regulatory, economic, and governance reasons why networks go dark, and surveys key case studies from across Canada's provinces and territories.
Section 1: What Is Dark Fibre?
Dark fibre refers to fibre-optic cable that has been physically installed in the ground, along utility corridors, or on poles, but has not been connected to active optical transmission equipment. In its dark state, the cable carries no signal and delivers no data service. Fibre becomes 'lit' when an internet service provider or network operator attaches optical electronics — including Optical Line Terminals (OLTs) at the central office and Optical Network Units or Terminals (ONUs/ONTs) at the customer premises — and begins transmitting data. Until that equipment is in place and connected, the fibre is simply an expensive, inert physical asset buried in the ground.
In the Canadian broadband context, dark fibre takes two broadly distinct forms. The first is intentionally dark fibre: cable laid with excess strand capacity or retained as a strategic reserve for future commercial licensing. Examples include legacy infrastructure from NBTel (New Brunswick Telephone), now part of Bell Aliant, and segments of the Alberta SuperNet backbone. These networks were engineered with spare capacity anticipated for future demand or licensing revenue, and in many cases the owning entity maintains the asset consciously and purposefully. The City of Calgary's 400+ km of municipal dark fibre, licensed to ISPs, health care organizations, and data centres, exemplifies this model working as intended.
The second form is unintentionally dark fibre: publicly or privately funded cable that was built under government grant programs but has not been activated because of missing last-mile connections, absent ISP partners, funding gaps, regulatory complications, or the operational inability of the project owner to run an active network. This type of dark fibre is the central policy concern of this report. It arises when backbone trunk lines reach community anchor institutions — schools, hospitals, band offices — but surrounding residences are never connected. It also arises when fibre passes homes but no ISP offers retail service over the infrastructure, and when subscriber take-up falls so far short of projections that the network cannot achieve financial sustainability.
Canada's regulatory treatment of dark fibre was clarified in a key 2010 CRTC ruling (summarized by Kelley Drye & Warren), which established that attaching optical equipment to dark fibre does not automatically make the entity a 'telecommunications carrier' subject to Canadian ownership requirements — removing a legal barrier that had previously discouraged foreign-backed ISPs from lighting leased dark fibre. The ruling classified optical electronics as 'exempt transmission apparatus' rather than a 'transmission facility.' This distinction matters enormously for policy: intentionally dark fibre (such as Calgary's 400+ km municipal network or New Brunswick's NBTel legacy) is a managed civic asset, capable of generating licensing revenue. Unintentionally dark fibre — backbone built without a last-mile counterpart, or fibre passed but without subscriber take-up — represents a policy failure and a waste of public capital that is much harder to remedy.
Section 2: Scale of the Problem — Federal Program Data
The 2023 Report of the Auditor General of Canada (Karen Hogan) was the most comprehensive federal audit of broadband program delivery to date. Its central finding was striking: only 40% of available federal broadband funding — approximately $949 million of $2.4 billion available by the 2022–23 fiscal year-end — had been disbursed as of January 2023. Low disbursement rates do not necessarily mean physical fibre is dark, but they do indicate that built infrastructure had not yet been activated, connected, and verified as delivering service to subscribers. Of the CRTC Broadband Fund specifically, only 26% of awarded funding had been disbursed; of the Universal Broadband Fund, only 25% had been paid out.
The Universal Broadband Fund (UBF), launched with $3.225 billion in dedicated funding, was designed to connect 98% of Canadians to high-speed internet by 2026. As of July 2024, UBF-funded projects had reached only approximately 33% of the 800,000 targeted households — including just 22% of the Indigenous households the program was specifically designed to serve. The construction deadline for many projects is March 31, 2027, meaning a significant volume of funded infrastructure is still being built, and activation remains years away for many communities.
Connect to Innovate (CTI), with $585 million invested primarily in backbone 'middle-mile' infrastructure, connected schools, hospitals, and anchor institutions in rural and remote communities across Canada. The program's backbone focus was its defining limitation: thousands of kilometres of fibre were installed without corresponding last-mile connections to homes, creating backbone-dark situations where community anchor institutions were technically connected while surrounding households remained without service. This structural gap — backbone without last-mile — is the defining dark fibre challenge in Canadian broadband policy.
Table 1: Federal Broadband Program Spending vs. Targets
Note: Low disbursement figures partly reflect the gap between committed/approved funding and active, lit networks delivering service to subscribers. Source: Office of the Auditor General of Canada, 2023 Report 2.
Section 3: Why Networks Remain Dark — Root Causes
There is no single reason Canadian fibre goes dark. The causes are structural, financial, regulatory, technical, and governance-related — and they frequently compound one another. A network may survive the construction phase only to fail at the activation stage because no ISP is willing to operate it, or to deliver service that no household can afford. The following sub-sections examine each category of cause in detail.
3.1 No Business Case for Last-Mile Activation
The most common reason backbone fibre remains dark is the absence of a viable business case for last-mile deployment. In rural and remote Canada, population densities are too low to justify the capital cost of running fibre drops to individual homes. The Connect to Innovate program explicitly targeted areas 'where there is currently no business case for the private sector to expand.' The practical result was backbone trunks connecting community anchor institutions — schools and hospitals — while surrounding residences remained unserved.
Even where last-mile infrastructure exists, ISPs may calculate that subscriber uptake will be too low to recover operating costs. The Clearwater County experience (Broadband Committee, February 2026) illustrates this dynamic sharply: breaking even operationally requires 2,562 subscribers, equivalent to a 58% take-up rate across all eligible county residences. As of early 2026 — after 2.5 months of marketing — only 572 homes had signed up. The infrastructure was physically deployed, but the economic foundation for sustainable operations had not materialized.
3.2 No Operator / Failed RFP Processes
Open-access networks built by municipalities or counties frequently go dark when no commercial ISP is willing to operate over the infrastructure. This occurred in Clearwater County in August 2025, when RFP BB11-2025 for Open-Access Network Operations returned no award — not a single commercial operator submitted a compliant bid at terms acceptable to the county. The same pattern appears in smaller rural networks across Canada where ISPs calculate that operating costs, including technical staff, maintenance, and backhaul fees, exceed any realistic revenue projection from a sparse subscriber base.
The CRTC's Broadband Breakfast panel in September 2025 heard from Amedeo Bernardi of Canada's Rural and Remote Broadband Community: 'Even with 100% funding, I think the challenge for a lot of these small communities is how do you generate enough revenue to offset the costs of operating?' This observation cuts to the heart of the problem — capital funding addresses construction, but it does nothing to resolve the ongoing operational economics of serving communities that are simply too small, too dispersed, or too low-income to sustain commercial internet service.
3.3 Big Telecom Acquisition and Strategic Suppression
Several documented cases exist of incumbent ISPs acquiring smaller public or regional networks and then failing to expand or activate them — in some cases allowing infrastructure to deteriorate. The most prominent Canadian example is Bell's 2014 acquisition of Ontera (Ontario Northland's telecom subsidiary) for $6 million cash plus approximately $10 million in future revenue obligations. Industry observers and northern Ontario elected officials subsequently described Bell as allowing much of the Ontera network to deteriorate, refusing to divest assets to competitors, and declining to offer affordable wholesale backhaul services that would have allowed smaller ISPs to serve Northern Ontario communities.
The result of the Ontera acquisition was that communities which formerly had access to an expanding publicly owned fibre network were left with a private monopoly that had little economic incentive to invest further in underserved areas. Similar acquisition-and-suppression dynamics have been described in analyses of the Alberta SuperNet. These cases illustrate a fundamental asymmetry: public and regional networks are built with a mandate to serve communities, while incumbent acquirers are legally bound only to serve shareholders — and in thin rural markets, those obligations frequently diverge.
3.4 The CRTC Open-Access Decision and Investment Chill
In August 2024 and finalized in April 2025, the CRTC ordered all incumbent broadband providers to open their fibre networks to competitors on a wholesale basis. Applied to existing fibre networks from February 2025 at interim rates, and finalized April 24, 2026 (Telecom Decision 2025-154), the ruling was intended to reduce retail prices and stimulate competition. The CRTC estimated that competitive providers had announced plans to reach up to 8.5 million households using incumbent fibre access under the new regime.
Bell Canada's response was to halt the majority of its fibre expansion. Reports from Bell employees and industry observers in April 2026 described 'significant cuts in network budget and layoffs,' and Bell had already declared its Ontario FTTP rollout 'finished' in 2023, years before the wholesale requirement took effect at scale. The resulting investment chill is real: privately funded fibre builds have slowed dramatically, and new construction is now predominantly government-subsidized rural projects. New fibre deployed after August 13, 2025 is protected from wholesale obligations until 2029 under a 'head start' rule — but this carve-out has not been sufficient to fully restore private investment momentum.
3.5 Physical and Geographic Barriers
Much of Canada's dark or theoretically available fibre is technically impractical to activate because of geography. Electricity Canada's 2020 submission to the CRTC (TNC 2019-406) presented Hydro Québec analysis showing that 81% of households in poorly served areas were more than 10 km from optical fibres on transmission lines, and 62% were more than 25 km away.
Utility dark fibre — frequently cited as a potential solution to broadband gaps — runs along transmission corridors that are often far from the communities they nominally pass.
Making mid-system fibre splices on long-haul optical systems is a complex, expensive engineering task that typically requires two or more years to plan and execute, and often costs more than building new infrastructure from scratch. The challenges include obtaining easements, managing signal integrity on affected spans, sourcing specialized splicing equipment, and coordinating with utility operators. Electricity Canada found that only 6.7% of Hydro Québec's optical network was classified as surplus and potentially available for broadband use — severely limiting the practical utility of utility dark fibre as a broadband solution.
3.6 Regulatory and Permitting Delays
Regulatory approvals and permitting processes added years to broadband project timelines, directly delaying activation of funded infrastructure. The 2023 Auditor General report found that approval processes 'took much too long,' resulting in billions of dollars committed but not deployed within the intended timeframes. ISPs and municipalities routinely cite right-of-way permitting, municipal council approvals, pole attachment negotiations with utilities, and environmental assessments as sources of six-month to two-year delays.
Ontario passed new regulations in late 2025 to allow ISPs to more easily attach broadband equipment to hydro poles — an explicit acknowledgment that the permitting bottleneck had directly contributed to missing the province's 2025 rural broadband target, which has since been pushed to 2028. The regulatory friction is not merely an administrative inconvenience: every year of delay represents another year of households without service and another year of funded infrastructure sitting built but unlit.
3.7 Ownership and Governance Fragmentation
Rural fibre builds are, as one telecom industry professional described in 2025, 'a tangled mess of small territories, lacking cohesion or accountability.' When government broadband funding is disbursed to multiple small regional operators without strong accountability requirements or coordination mechanisms, the result is fragmented coverage: overlapping areas where two funded networks serve the same homes while adjacent areas with no business case remain completely unserved.
In Ontario, EORN's FTTP model distributed network interconnect points so widely across 5,500 km of fibre that connecting as a third-party ISP became prohibitively expensive. A network technically available to competitors was functionally inaccessible because the cost of establishing connections at dozens of distributed Points of Presence exceeded any reasonable ISP business case. Governance fragmentation thus produces a subtle but important variant of the dark fibre problem: infrastructure that is technically 'lit' but commercially inaccessible to the competing operators that would make it deliver affordable, competitive service.
3.8 Affordability: Built But Not Subscribed
A network with active equipment but zero subscribers is functionally dark from a social utility standpoint. The 2023 Auditor General report found that neither ISED nor the CRTC measured affordability — focusing only on whether broadband service was technically available at a given address, not whether households in that address could afford to subscribe. This gap in measurement means that publicly funded networks can be reported as 'successful' in government accountability frameworks even when the populations they are built to serve remain effectively disconnected.
NorthwesTel, which serves much of Canada's North, offers unlimited 50/10 Mbps service in some Northwest Territories communities at $129.95/month — technically meeting the CRTC's basic service target, but unaffordable for many Northern residents on fixed or limited incomes. Household surveys conducted in NWT communities in 2023–24 found overage fees of $50–$200/month on top of base service costs. Infrastructure may be 'lit' by every regulatory definition, but the population it nominally serves remains effectively disconnected due to cost — a form of functional darkness that existing policy frameworks are not designed to measure or address.
Section 4: Case Studies
4.1 Alberta SuperNet — $1 Billion, 25 Years, Last Place in Rural Access
Launched in 2001, the Alberta SuperNet was a landmark $1 billion provincial initiative to build a backbone network connecting 4,200 schools, hospitals, libraries, and government offices across 429 communities, using a combination of fibre-optic cable, wireless towers, and related equipment. It was, at the time of its completion, one of the most ambitious public broadband investments in Canadian history. Twenty-five years later, Alberta ranks last among all Canadian provinces in reaching federal broadband benchmarks.
As of 2022, 67% of rural Albertans and 80% of Indigenous communities in Alberta lacked access to reliable high-speed internet at the federal target speed of 50/10 Mbps. In 2021, 489,000 Albertans across 201,000 households lacked any access at those speeds. The SuperNet's failure is instructive precisely because the infrastructure investment was substantial: it built backbone without last-mile, connecting anchor institutions but leaving surrounding residences dependent on private-sector ISPs choosing to connect to the backbone — a connection that largely did not happen on economic grounds.
The Alberta Auditor General found in 2018 that Service Alberta did not properly manage or monitor the $1 billion in contracts signed with private companies over the SuperNet's 17-year operating history. A Red Deer County broadband official described SuperNet as 'a massive failure on the province's part.' The Alberta government subsequently launched a second phase of broadband investment — now branded as Alberta Connects and supporting UBF grant applications — specifically to address the last-mile gaps that the SuperNet left unresolved. The SuperNet case is the definitive Canadian example of backbone investment without activation producing, at scale, the illusion of connectivity.
4.2 New Brunswick — NBTel Legacy Dark Fibre
New Brunswick's former provincial telephone company, NBTel (merged into Bell Aliant in 1999), was described by former Premier Frank McKenna as 'remarkably forward-thinking in wiring New Brunswick.' The result was an extensive web of dark fibre across the province — including significant infrastructure in Saint John — that sat largely unused for decades following the Bell merger. As of January 2026, this legacy dark fibre was being repositioned as an economic development asset, with McKenna calling it 'an extraordinary resource' for attracting AI data centres. Federal Transport Minister Steven MacKinnon acknowledged the dark fibre infrastructure during a 2026 visit to Saint John, highlighting its potential for latency-sensitive applications given Saint John's competitive round-trip times to Boston, Halifax, and Montreal.
The irony embedded in the New Brunswick case is significant: dark fibre built for telephony in the 1990s is now valuable for data centre latency arbitrage, but it was not used to serve rural New Brunswick residents who still lacked adequate broadband access in 2024. The province
received $55 million in federal UBF funding in 2022 to connect 11,000 rural households — suggesting that even a legacy-fibre-rich province had connectivity gaps requiring new government investment to fill. Legacy dark fibre and contemporary broadband access gaps coexist because the former is built along commercial transmission corridors, not to residential addresses.
4.3 Ontera / Northern Ontario — Public Network Privatized and Suppressed
Ontera was Ontario's publicly owned telecommunications subsidiary under Ontario Northland, providing fibre and internet services to Northern Ontario communities for decades. In 2014, the Ontario government sold Ontera to Bell Aliant for $6 million cash — a transaction the provincial Auditor General estimated would cost Ontario $820 million in net value if the full Ontario Northland Transportation Commission divestiture proceeded as planned. Bell agreed to a 20-year lease with Eastlink to cover part of the remote northern footprint.
Industry observers and the Mayor of Cochrane warned at the time that a private acquirer's 'vested interests are their shareholders.' Subsequent reporting confirmed that Bell allowed much of the Ontera network to deteriorate, refused to divest assets to competing ISPs in Northern Ontario, and did not provide affordable wholesale backhaul services that would have enabled smaller providers to serve northern communities. Communities that had access to an expanding public network lost that access when the infrastructure was transferred to an incumbent with no regulatory mandate to build it out further.
4.4 City of Brooks, Alberta — Dark Fibre Discovery and Open-Access Pivot
The City of Brooks' broadband journey began with the discovery of pre-existing dark fibre — a line installed but never activated — in southeast Alberta. After securing funding through the Community and Regional Economic Support (CARES) program to assess the asset, the city found that 'lighting' the dark fibre would be more expensive than using existing ISP cables. Rather than investing in the legacy dark fibre, Brooks pivoted to build its own municipally owned open-access network (BrooksNet), using the dark fibre discovery as a catalyst to understand the value of owning and controlling physical infrastructure.
The Brooks case illustrates both the opportunity and the economic limitation of discovered dark fibre. Its existence accelerated the community's broadband planning and built political will for municipal ownership, but its economics — as is frequently the case with legacy dark fibre — made direct activation impractical. The high cost of mid-system splices, optical termination equipment, and backhaul connections frequently makes lighting legacy fibre more expensive than building new fibre from scratch, particularly for short-span community networks where cable costs are not the dominant expense.
4.5 Clearwater County, Alberta — Open-Access FTTH with No Operator (2025)
Clearwater County's $140 million open-access fibre-to-the-home program (2020–2027) is one of the most ambitious rural municipal broadband builds in Canada. Supported by over $87 million in federal and provincial UBF grants, the network is designed to pass 4,399 homes across 7,227 county residences. As of February 2026, 572 homes had signed up for fibre connections — well below the 2,562 homes (58% take-up rate) required to achieve operational break-even.
More significantly, the county's August 2025 Request for Proposals for Open-Access Network Operations (BB11-2025) returned no award. No commercial ISP was willing to submit a bid to operate the network at terms acceptable to the county. Under UBF grant conditions, the county must own and operate the network for at least five years post-construction — approximately until 2032 — before any sale or transfer can occur. The county thus faces the prospect of operating a $140 million fibre network without a contracted operator, in a sparsely populated rural area, while attempting to build subscriber take-up from a very low base.
The Clearwater County situation is the unintentional dark fibre problem in its most complete modern form: infrastructure built, publicly funded, and physically complete — but functionally dark because no commercial entity will run it at terms that are economically sustainable for either party. It raises profound questions about whether grant program design should require proof of an operator agreement before construction funding is disbursed.
4.6 City of Calgary — Intentional Dark Fibre as Economic Asset
Not all dark fibre represents failure. The City of Calgary maintains more than 400 km of municipal dark fibre across all city quadrants, which it actively licenses to ISPs, health care organizations, educational institutions, data centres, and businesses at transparent, published pricing. This is intentional dark fibre managed as a civic infrastructure asset — enabling competition and infrastructure investment without the city needing to operate retail internet services itself. The licensing model has attracted multiple operators and contributed to Calgary's reputation as a competitive broadband market.
The Calgary model demonstrates what well-managed dark fibre looks like when governance structures, business cases, and licensing frameworks are in place from the outset. The critical difference between Calgary's intentionally dark fibre and the unintentionally dark fibre found elsewhere is not the physical asset — it is the institutional capacity, commercial framework, and urban density that make licensing viable and economically self-sustaining.
4.7 Eastern Ontario Regional Network (EORN) — Backbone Built, Last-Mile Fragmented
EORN, a $170 million project completed in fall 2014, built a 5,500 km fibre backbone across Eastern Ontario, with 160 Points of Presence. It connected 99% of homes and businesses in its coverage area to the backbone network — a technical achievement by any measure. However, initial access speeds for most users were limited to 10 Mbps via fixed wireless connections dependent on the backbone, rather than the gigabit-class fibre speeds the backbone could theoretically support. The backbone was complete; the last-mile was served by a patchwork of fixed wireless providers.
A structural flaw identified in subsequent analysis: EORN's FTTP model distributed network interconnect points so widely across the 5,500 km backbone that connecting as a third-party ISP was financially impractical. ISPs who might have competed to serve end users could not afford the cost of establishing connections at dozens of geographically distributed Points of Presence. The result was that despite a functional and physically complete backbone, meaningful fibre-to-the-home competition on the EORN network remained elusive — illustrating how network architecture decisions made at the design stage can determine whether infrastructure becomes a genuine open-access asset or a nominal one.
Section 5: Regulatory Context
The regulatory framework governing dark fibre and broadband activation in Canada has evolved significantly since 2010, shaped by CRTC rulings on ownership, access, and wholesale obligations. At the same time, persistent failures in connectivity mapping and spectrum access have limited the effectiveness of the regulatory regime in directing public investment to where it is needed most.
CRTC 2010 Dark Fibre Ruling. A 2010 CRTC decision, summarized by Kelley Drye & Warren, cleared the legal path for non-Canadian-majority entities to activate dark fibre by classifying optical equipment (but not the fibre itself) as 'exempt transmission apparatus' — not a 'transmission facility' under the Telecommunications Act. This distinction removed a major barrier: previously, ISPs with foreign ownership had been reluctant to light leased dark fibre for fear of being classified as telecommunications carriers subject to Canadian ownership requirements. The ruling opened the market to a broader range of operators and investors, stimulating dark fibre leasing activity in major Canadian markets.
CRTC 2024/2025 Open-Access Wholesale Order. In August 2024, the CRTC issued a landmark decision requiring all incumbent broadband providers to open their fibre networks to competitors on a wholesale basis. Applied to existing fibre networks from February 2025 at interim rates, and finalized April 24, 2026 (Telecom Decision 2025-154), the order was intended to reduce retail prices and enable competitive ISPs to reach millions of additional households. The CRTC estimated that competitive providers announced plans to reach up to 8.5 million households using incumbent fibre access. New fibre built after August 13, 2025 is protected from sharing requirements until 2029 under a 'head start' rule designed to preserve some incentive for continued investment. The order has nonetheless triggered a significant investment chill from Bell, which halted most new Ontario and Quebec fibre expansion.
Connectivity Mapping Failures. The 2023 Auditor General report found that Canada's National Broadband Internet Service Availability Map — the primary federal tool for directing broadband funding — was 'both inaccurate and out of date.' In documented cases, communities without coverage were shown on the map as having coverage, making them technically ineligible for grant programs despite having no actual service. This misdirected public funding and left some of the most underserved communities in a regulatory blind spot — unable to access programs designed specifically to help them.
Spectrum Access Barriers. The 2018 Auditor General report found that small and regional ISPs 'did not have sufficient access to high-quality spectrum to support broadband deployment in rural and remote areas.' The Department of Innovation, Science and Economic Development auctioned spectrum in geographic areas too large for smaller providers to bid on competitively, and the secondary market for unused spectrum functioned poorly because licensees had little business incentive to sell or lease spectrum they were not using. The result was a wireless equivalent of the dark fibre problem: spectrum licensed to large incumbents but sitting unused in rural areas while smaller ISPs who could have served those communities lacked the frequencies needed to do so.
Section 6: Key Observations & Recommendations
The following eight observations synthesize the evidence from federal program data, case studies, and regulatory analysis presented in this report. Each identifies a distinct structural problem in Canada's approach to broadband infrastructure and points toward the policy reforms needed to ensure that public investment in fibre produces actual connectivity rather than built-but-dark infrastructure.
1. The backbone-last-mile gap is Canada's defining dark fibre problem. Canada has invested heavily in backbone trunk infrastructure — SuperNet, Connect to Innovate, EORN — that connects anchor institutions. Without corresponding last-mile investment and ISP activation, that backbone creates the illusion of connectivity while leaving households unserved. Future federal programs must require last-mile activation plans as a condition of backbone funding approval.
2. Open-access network models without operator contracts are structurally vulnerable. Municipal and county open-access networks (Clearwater County, EORN) frequently fail to attract commercial ISP operators, because rural subscriber density is too low to be commercially viable even on subsidized infrastructure. Grant programs should require proof of a signed operator agreement — or a credible self-operation plan — before construction funding is released.
3. Grant programs have funded construction without ensuring activation. Programs like UBF and CTI disbursed funding tied to infrastructure build milestones, not to subscriber connection rates or operational viability. A network that is physically complete but commercially unoperatable represents a misallocation of public funds. Milestone payments should be restructured to include activation targets and subscriber connection thresholds.
4. Big telecom acquisitions have converted public assets into suppressed private monopolies.
The Ontera case demonstrates a pattern where publicly funded or publicly owned fibre networks, when sold to incumbents, lose their mandate to expand and often deteriorate. Future grant conditions and public asset divestiture agreements should prohibit resale to dominant incumbent ISPs for a defined period (10–15 years), preserving the competitive or public-service mandate of the original network.
5. The CRTC's open-access order has created an investment chill in private fibre builds. Bell's halt of most new Ontario/Quebec fibre expansion since 2024 has shifted the burden of rural connectivity entirely to government-funded programs — increasing public expenditure while reducing the private investment the regulatory framework was designed to leverage. The CRTC must develop complementary mechanisms to sustain private investment while ensuring competitive access.
6. Canada lacks a national infrastructure owner for broadband.
Unlike the United Kingdom (Openreach), New Zealand (Chorus), or Australia (NBN Co.), Canada has no single entity responsible for physical last-mile infrastructure with a mandate to provide open wholesale access nationally. This structural absence means Canada's connectivity gaps are addressed through a patchwork of competing funded projects without coordination, accountability, or economies of scale.
7. Affordability remains untracked, making some 'lit' networks functionally dark. The Auditor General found that neither ISED nor the CRTC measured affordability — only availability. Networks serving communities where monthly costs exceed 10–15% of household income are effectively dark regardless of physical connection status. Federal broadband programs should adopt affordability metrics alongside availability metrics, and link grant compliance requirements to maximum retail pricing thresholds in supported communities.
8. New Brunswick's legacy NBTel dark fibre and Clearwater County's new FTTH network represent opposite poles of the dark fibre spectrum.
NBTel dark fibre is a legacy asset now valuable for data centre applications — built before broadband demand existed. Clearwater County FTTH is freshly built, publicly funded, and at risk of remaining functionally dark because commercial operators will not activate it at viable terms. Both cases point to the same structural gap: physical infrastructure alone does not produce connectivity. Governance, economics, and activation must be designed in before the first metre of cable is laid.
Sources
All sources are numbered and listed below. Where superscript citation numbers appear in the body text, they correspond to the numbered entries in this list.
1. Office of the Auditor General of Canada — Report 2: Connectivity in Rural and Remote Areas (2023) — https://www.canada.ca/en/auditor-general/our-work/audit-reports/parl-oag-202303-02-e.html
2. Office of the Auditor General of Canada — Report 1: Connectivity in Rural and Remote Areas (2018) — https://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2018/bvg-oag/FA1-27-2018-2-6-eng.pdf
3. ISED Canada — Universal Broadband Fund —
https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/high-speed-internet-canada/en/universal-broadband-fund
4. ISED Canada — Summary of UBF Evaluation (2024) —
https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/audits-evaluations/en/evaluation/summary-evaluation-universal-broadband-fund 5. CRTC Broadband Fund — https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/internet/fnd/index.htm
6. CRTC — Telecom Decision 2025-154 (Open-Access Wholesale Final Rates) —
https://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/2025/2025-154.htm
7. CRTC — Takes Action to Help Deliver More Affordable Internet (April 24, 2026) — https://www.canada.ca/en/radio-te levision-telecommunications/news/2026/04/crtc-takes-action-to-help-deliver-more-choice-of-affordable-internet services.html
8. Kelley Drye — CRTC Clears Path for Resellers to Light Dark Fiber (2010) —
https://www.kelleydrye.com/viewpoints/client-advisories/crtc-clears-path-for-resellers-to-light-dark-fiber
9. Electricity Canada — Response on Dark Fibre Access (CRTC TNC 2019-406) —
https://www.electricity.ca/files/reports/english/Final-CRTC-TNC-2019-406-CEA3.pdf
10. Open Media — Auditor General Findings on CRTC/ISED Affordability Failures — https://openmedia.org/press/item/au ditor-general-finds-crtc-and-ised-are-failing-to-track-affordability-a-key-barrier-to-connectivity
11. CBC — Alberta SuperNet: Rural Internet Lagging (2025) —
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/albertan-rural-internet-lagging-1.7438965
12. CBC — Alberta Auditor Flags SuperNet Contract Management (2018) —
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/alberta-auditor-general-supernet-1.4896294
13. CBC — New Brunswick Dark Fibre as Data Centre Asset (2026) — https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick /saint-john-dark-fibre-volta-grid-beacon-ai-centres-frank-mckenna-9.7043583
14. CBC — Ontera Sale to Bell Aliant (2014) — https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sudbury/ontera-sale-to-bell-aliant-leav es-questions-for-customers-employees-1.2601329
15. Global News — Ontario Rural Broadband Target Missed (2025) —
https://globalnews.ca/news/11504865/ford-government-broadband-internet-deadlined-missed-starlink/
16. Alberta Municipalities — Municipal Broadband Toolkit (2023) —
https://www.abmunis.ca/system/files/2023-10/Municipal%20Broadband%20Toolkit_2.pdf
17. City of Calgary — Dark Fibre Licensing — https://www.calgary.ca/major-projects/dark-fibre.html
18. Broadband Breakfast — Canada Broadband Progress (September 2025) —
https://broadbandbreakfast.com/canada-makes-significant-broadband-progress-but-rural-gaps-persist/
19. POTs and PANs — Canada Orders Open Access (September 2025) —
https://potsandpansbyccg.com/2025/09/11/canada-finally-orders-open-access/
20. Policy Options — Struggle for Affordable Internet in Remote Canada (2024) —
https://policyoptions.irpp.org/2024/08/affordable-internet-remote-canada/
Page 17 — Dark Fibre & Unactivated Broadband in Canada
21. Standing Committee on Public Accounts — Connectivity in Rural and Remote Areas (2025) — https://publications.gc.ca/site/eng/9.958100/publication.html
22. Clearwater County Broadband Committee — Strategic Options Review (Feb 13, 2026) — https://clearwatercounty.civicweb.net/filepro/documents/66090?handle=CFA16849BD104DA9AFCB7B93AD4B1C97
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