Arctic Fibre Inc. was established in 2009 to review the physical, technical and economic obstacles to the development of a fibre optic telecommunications network in the Canadian Arctic.  Subsequent studies determined that the Arctic ice cap had receded enough to permit the installation of a 15,600 km network between Tokyo and London through the southern portion of the North West Passage and that ice scour issues were manageable.

In the past two years the incremental bandwidth provided by the upgrade from 10 gigabit wavelengths to 40G wavelengths has provided the economies of scale necessary to construct the system.   The design of Arctic Fibre has been undertaken at 40G but the network may be upgraded to 100G as that technology is refined and proven prior to the construction of the backbone in 2014Q4.

The Arctic Fibre network is being constructed to:  

* Displace costly and sometimes unreliable satellite service to the Canadian Arctic thereby bridging the digital divide between the Canadian Arctic and the rest of Canada. The Arctic Fibre network will also facilitate improved intra-regional communications in the North.  A similar situation exists in Alaska.

* Reduce governmental cost of providing distance health care, education, national security and justice administration in the Canadian North and Alaska.

* Create physically diverse routes to avoid physical cable breaks plaguing carriers in the Luzon Strait, South China Sea, Suez Canal and the Mediterranean.

* Reduce subsea seismic risk by providing another routing into the Chikura CLS and by providing eventual direct connectivity to Chongming CLS (Shanghai) through an underwater branching unit offshore Chikura.

* Avoid potential interference to data crossing politically-unstable or monitored terrestrial routes.

* Provide the lowest latency route from Northern China, Korea and Japan to the UK and Northern Europe and competitive routes to the US Northeast.