CityWest's Highway 37 fiber route adds a second way north

CityWest has confirmed plans to build a new fiber route along Highway 37 in northern British Columbia, a redundancy project born from the fiber cut that disrupted its customers this month, first reported by Data Center Dynamics as the Northern Resiliency project and described by the B.C.-based carrier as a physically separate telecommunications path through the region. The sequence began in Alberta, where the cut disrupted service for CityWest customers; at the time the company told DCD it was advancing a new fiber transport route along Highway 37 that will create an additional pathway into Northern B.C. Two weeks later the plan is official, and the route is designed so traffic can be redirected north along Highway 37 whenever another major fiber path is unavailable.

There is no fiber-optic telecoms route extending north toward the Yukon along Highway 37 today, and the project will establish a new corridor separate from the existing infrastructure along Highway 16, reducing the region's reliance on what CityWest describes as a limited number of geographic pathways.

For any network operator, fiber cuts are a recurring hazard, and CityWest is building the one thing the region does not have: a second physical path. The design choices address the failure modes of remote northern fiber: the new infrastructure will be installed underground, making it less visible and less exposed to risks such as theft, wildfire, vehicle collisions and wildlife damage, and equipment sites along the route will include redundant power systems meant to keep operations running through extended power outages. Chief operating officer Wes Eisses put the rationale plainly: "Reliability is at the center of every decision we make. From network design to ongoing maintenance, our goal is to deliver service customers can depend on every day."

CityWest will own and operate the fiber, working with Tahltan Nation Development Corporation on the build, and funding support comes from the CRTC Broadband Fund. The route will be available to other telecommunications carriers and set to be operational by the end of 2027, though the company said it could not publicly disclose further details about specific network routes, architecture, or infrastructure configurations.

As this publication has argued, a new artery for a hyperscaler campus clears at infrastructure pricing, with a long-term contract underwriting the cost; a regional redundancy route in northern British Columbia does not have that luxury. Here, the CRTC Broadband Fund is doing the work a hyperscaler would do, providing the funding that lets a regional carrier take on a build that might otherwise be unpriced risk.

By making the route available to other carriers, CityWest is buying redundancy not just for its own customers but for any operator that wants a second path north, and the value shows up on outage days, not on a monthly income statement. This is regional insurance, not a commercial fiber trade.

For anyone underwriting digital infrastructure, the Highway 37 route is a useful counterexample to the idea that every fiber build needs a hyperscaler to clear capital: some assets earn their keep in avoided losses, not in revenue, and a route whose only job is to be there when the main path is down is one of them. The business case leans on a public fund rather than a private contract, and that is exactly how remote backbone gets built.

The real test will come the next time a fiber cut takes down the Highway 16 corridor. By the end of 2027, CityWest expects to have a second way north, a physically separate path that keeps traffic moving when the primary route is down. For a region that currently has no such option, that is the difference between an outage and an inconvenience.