OTTAWA — Madeleine Redfern was the mayor of Iqaluit when the one satellite providing internet access in the far North failed for almost a full day in 2011.

“Everything came to a complete halt. I mean, literally, you couldn’t go to the bank and get money and buy gas or groceries,” she recalled in an interview with The Logic. That was a decade ago, but it still happens in the Nunavut capital sometimes, when there’s a blizzard or a bad rainstorm.

“You can’t simply just have your customers go to the ATM and take cash out—or even go physically to the bank location and get cash out because it’s all dependent on the same broadband,” Redfern said.

Redfern is now chief operating officer of CanArctic Inuit Networks, which wants to solve that once and for all with a $100-million fibre-optic cable called SednaLink, named for the Inuit goddess of the sea.

Local stores in Iqaluit, even those connected to national chains, do inventory the old-fashioned way, regularly counting the goods shelf by shelf, because they can’t rely on the internet connections needed to track sales and replenish their goods, Redfern said. “It’s not efficient,” she said. “It’s more costly in different ways.”

Other businesses have an even harder time with the poor connectivity.

“A lot of what we do is go capture high-resolution images and transfer it to various different services online, so we upload 20 [gigabytes] or more of data at a time,” Kirt Ejesiak, CEO of Arctic UAV, told The Logic. Ejesiak’s customers include governments seeking up-to-date topographical data, mining companies looking for aerial surveys, and production companies buying video footage.

The company serves them from a headquarters in a small former Hudson’s Bay Company building facing Koojesse Inlet in Apex, just outside Iqaluit proper.

Ejesiak said he had a routine technical problem with a drone recently.

“I tried to upload 22 gig to my supplier to help us troubleshoot,” he said. “I couldn’t upload it for the life of me. I tried for a week and burned through probably 100 gig of data, because it would get about 80 per cent done and crap out.”

After stripping files down to the bare minimum, Arctic UAV will often try multiple transfer methods at the same time: the standard satellite internet, tethering a cellphone … and putting an SD card or thumb drive in the mail. Often the mail gets the job done first.

“We try to get the stuff out to our suppliers and customers [however we can],” Ejesiak said.

This all works adequately for Arctic UAV to stay in business but it’s inefficient. Ejesiak said the company wishes it could offer more products such as data on demand—material kept on its own servers, sold to customers à la carte with a few clicks.

“We just can’t do that at all. Not effectively. We don’t want to offer something that is substandard,” he said.

Satellite internet providers such as Telesat and Space X promise their low Earth-orbit constellations will offer better service. Redfern said an upgrade to the existing satellite service for Iqaluit has made connections somewhat faster but also more fragile—and she favours the reliability of a fixed fibre-optic cable, with satellites as backups.

“The more redundancy that you have, especially fibre-to-fibre redundancy, the better in the event that communication needs to be rerouted,” she said.

CanArctic had commissioned studies on where to lay the fibre off the continental shelf—on the shortest workable route, but deep enough to avoid being scraped by icebergs. It planned to run its cable between Iqaluit and Clarenville, a town on the east coast of Newfoundland. That’s where the first transatlantic telephone cable came ashore (it went into service in 1956) and it’s currently the landing spot of a fibre-optic link to Nuuk, in Greenland.

But then Redfern’s business partner in the south, veteran cable-layer Doug Cunningham, heard about Peder Nærbø. The Norwegian entrepreneur’s company, Bulk Infrastructure, operates data centres in Norway and Denmark, linked via its own undersea cables to Ireland and the United States—and he wants to lay a new one.

“On both sides of the Atlantic, both North America and in Europe, the data centres in the big companies are travelling north—because of cold air, because of stable climates. You can cool down data centres and you also have political stability,” he told The Logic.

Bulk has a data centre in Norway powered by a nearby hydro dam and sees an opportunity to build an equivalent in Canada.

“Ultimately, we’d like to go to Montreal, because we would like to make a similar type of Canadian … campus,” Nærbø said. “A data-centre campus of some size and some scalability with multiple-hundred megawatts, and to have a neutral platform for data centres to grow both in the Nordic region and also on the Canadian side, on renewable energy.”

Nærbø added that they’d be connected with a new Bulk cable, named after legendary Norse explorer Leif Erikson.

If it’s built, the Leif Erikson cable would be the most northerly direct link between Europe and North America, linking Husnes, part way up a fjord on the west coast of Norway, and Happy Valley-Goose Bay, in Labrador.

“We want to build these fibre cables into regions where we can unlock further potential for this renewable energy that we have, both of us,” Nærbø said. “Somebody asked me if I can put [a cable] into Boston. I said, ‘No, that’s not my—that’s not interesting.’ And I wouldn’t go to Halifax either, I wouldn’t go to Nova Scotia. I would like to go up north, so we can unlock these resources.”

The Leif Erikson cable would cross both the existing Clarenville-Nuuk cable and the original route for the CanArctic cable. To CanArctic, that smelled like opportunity.

“We reached out and connected and began to have the initial discussions about where Bulk was at in their thinking or planning stages,” Redfern said. “It was agreed early on, off the bat, that there could be good synergy between the two projects and discussions began earnestly last spring.”

Hooking into the Leif Erikson cable would shorten CanArctic’s SednaLink by about 500 kilometres, Redfern said. At a rough cost of $40,000 to $50,000 a kilometre, that’s $20 million to $25 million saved. CanArctic and Bulk’s cables would also be made at the same time and laid by the same ships.

In October, CanArctic and Bulk signed a memorandum of understanding on further cooperation, and Nærbø visited Canada to drive from Montreal to Happy Valley-Goose Bay.

“I looked at the complexity along the routes, met with the Quebec government, also the Newfoundland and Labrador government, also met with several groups of Indigenous Peoples so that everybody knows that we would like to have this project up in the next few years,” he said.

The hydro dams left him awestruck, he told The Logic at the time, sounding weary but exhilarated over the phone from Miami, where he was catching a connecting flight home.

“The problem with renewable energy in general is that it doesn’t scale as well, because—you have wind farms, they need to be offshore, if they are going to scale. Solar farms also have, you know, its challenges if you are in the metro areas, et cetera.”

Compare that to thousands of megawatts of stable hydroelectric power already online, between Hydro-Québec and Newfoundland and Labrador’s Nalcor.

“I think the sustainability of that region is second to none,” Nærbø said. “You eat Norway and the Nordics for breakfast.”

Bulk can raise the money for the ocean cable, Nærbø said confidently: there’s a growing market for data centre capacity and for internet linkages that don’t rely on the United States. The overland connection southwest to Quebec’s urban corridor along the St. Lawrence River will take government funding.

For Iqaluit, the Nunavut territorial government has been working on plans for a different fibre-optic connection via Quebec, after scrapping its own $209-million project to connect to Nuuk. Since an October election led to major changes in the territorial cabinet, including a new premier, Redfern has been lobbying.

“We’re busy letting them know that money, that $209 million, could be deployed to other infrastructure projects,” she said. “Including, if they wanted, to the ability to extend fibre to connect more communities weren’t getting the link once Phase 1 has been built.”

Iqaluit also needs a new water system, a project whose cost is estimated at $180 million.

It’s critical that any fibre connection be built so new links can be spliced off it, Redfern said: Indigenous people know too well about the hydro projects that send power to southern cities but bypass Indigenous communities that have to truck in diesel for their generators.

CanArctic is seeking federal backing from the Canadian Infrastructure Bank and the Universal Broadband Fund for SednaLink and is working on Inuit investment, Redfern said.

“There’s a whole lot of talk about Indigenous reconciliation and Indigenous economic reconciliation,” she said. The SednaLink cable, a private project guided by northerners and enabling development in the North, is reconciliation, she said.

Redfern has Ejesiak’s support in that.

“We maintain these buildings—it’s not run by any government outfit. My sign blew off, so guess what? I have to fix it,” he said. “Not all operations [here] are government-run. We’re actually completely against having government-run operations because they get run into the ground and are not very efficient.”