Telus battles 400% increase in copper wire thefts in Calgary, as thousands left without phone service

Telus is battling a 400 per cent increase in major copper wire thefts and vandalism in Calgary this year, as thousands of Calgary customers have been left without access to landline, internet and cable service in recent months.

The company has seen 20 significant incidents in Calgary in 2023, compared with four incidents in the previous year.

But it isn't just a Calgary problem — the number of incidents across the country has increased by 103 per cent this year.

Brian Lakey, vice-president of Telus's reliability centre of excellence, told CBC News in an interview that there have been 57 significant incidents causing customer impacts in Canada this year, compared with 28 last year.

"We see about 68 million minutes of customer outage and degradation attributed to cable theft and that's about an increase of 750 per cent year over year," said Lakey, who also co-chairs the Canadian Telecom Network Resiliency Working Group.

Lakey says the thefts are also becoming larger, which affects more customers and takes longer to repair. The vandalism often also takes out cell towers and power lines, he said.

"When this happens, customers are without emergency services — so without access to 911, be that the ambulance, fire department, police — and if it's impacting both their cellular service and their landline, they have no way of calling for help."

As of Sunday, nearly 3,000 residents in the southeast community of Ogden didn't have access to home phone service, said Lakey. The outage started on the morning of Dec. 8 and isn't expected to be resolved until Dec. 22, according to the company's website.

In August, a similar outage occurred in a number of northwest communities after a copper cable theft in Bowness, which disrupted services for a few hundred customers.

Copper wire thefts don't always affect hundreds or thousands of residents. 

Earlier this month, Steve Tarzwell — who doesn't own a cell phone — went 12 days without service on his landline phone. He also lost his internet connection for a couple of days.

Tarzwell, who lives in Calgary's northeast community of Martindale, says he only heard of a few neighbours affected by this particular outage.

"It basically reminded me that it's not 100 per cent guaranteed, the service that you have," said Tarzwell.

He says it's concerning that he wouldn't have been able to contact emergency services if he needed, but he realizes the impact was likely much worse on others — like seniors who couldn't get in touch with their loved ones and people who needed to call to get their prescriptions filled and delivered.