2026 began with the goal of connecting the fibre backbone to Meadow Creek, completing fibre-to-the-home service to East Shore communities from Birchdale to Kootenay Bay, completing our lake loop for redundancy and planning fibre extensions to Howser, Cooper Creek and South Fork.

We began filing numerous applications and coordinating with East Shore Internet Society, Telus and Rogers in the Balfour-Pilot Peninsula area.

Out of the blue on February 4, the Columbia Basin Trust announced that CityWest, a for-profit corporation headquartered in Prince Rupert, would take over the Internet management for the entire Columbia Basin. That decision will have a huge impact on nonprofits like KiN, which plow their income back into the communities they serve. Even nine months later we’ve been unable to find out what CityWest will charge us for bandwidth and we are now having to purchase our own expensive IPv4 addresses—things that were managed by a subsidiary of the Trust. Return of the for-profit model will see revenue being extracted from the Basin once again by an outside corporation.

Then in March SpaceX went public and cut its Starlink rates below cost in order to dominate service to rural areas. Although KiN’s fibre to the home provides better service, we chose out of caution to delay our expansion down the south arm of Kootenay Lake, where the cost per connection is higher, until the market stabilizes. We also reduced our service rates, reduced our construction hiring and reassigned some office staff to reflect the change in our expansion plans.

Permitting delays for lake landings and a strike by the Archaeological Branch required schedule changes but work continued wherever possible. In July, the forest fire risk became so severe that construction involving machine excavation was halted so we moved to other areas or continued with low risk manual work. Lake fibre installation and shore landings were able to proceed.

Despite delays and plan changes, the construction year has been productive. The Riondel townsite and North Road are now fully served by our fibre and we have been coordinating with Riondel Cable Society to build a security backup for our Kemball Building datacenter in their service building. We are gradually harmonizing Riondel service rates and continuing their TV access, which will eventually be offered to the rest of the KiN service area.

By the end of October we expect to connect Meadow Creek with fibre, offering full speed Internet at last. Salisbury Creek is now on our network, Birchdale should be completed by late October and Murphy Creek’s cabinet is online. Our long-planned redundancy loop in Kootenay Lake has been completed, with connections to Riondel, Walker’s Landing, Ainsworth, Pilot Point and Balfour.

Isaac Maxfield, our Executive Director and Board Member, will be reducing his hours after several years as our construction and financial manager; Marco DeBortoli will be taking on much of his workload.

As we approach KiN’s 30th anniversary on October 21 we will be reflecting proudly on more than 80 volunteers from Kaslo and area who helped KiN become an essential service provider for the entire north Kootenay Lake valley community. Our volunteer Board (besides Isaac) includes Josée Bayeur, Bob Gazzard, Jean-Michel Longval, Angele Ortega and Mike Stevely. The people who get KiN’s work done (besides Isaac and Marco) are Stewart Coonce, Scott Gillies, Tyler Hamilton, Matt Low, Hillary Schell, Mark Thomson and Sam Truchon.

Don Scarlett

KiN Board Chair