Cortes Island Residents Waiting for CityWest To Connect Them

Roy L Hales/Cortes Currents - This is Roy Hales with Cortes Currents and as the data for the following report was almost exclusively collected by email or phone, the only voice in the following report is mine. CityWest started hooking Cortes Island residents up to the internet in December 2023, but many homes are still waiting. As the evidence is anecdotal, it is difficult to say how many people are currently connected through CityWest and how many are not. Sherman Barker just informed me that he has never met anyone who is connected. After waiting for two years of waiting, he was using Starlink by the time a CityWest crew showed up to do the final hook-up.  “I have a pile of CityWest cable, all the way from my driveway to my yard, that they don’t want back.”   Sean Coyote, a techie who works for Cortes Community Radio, said typically people who have yet to be serviced are told their names are on a list. Some, like Sherman, subsequently moved on to other internet providers. Sean added that there are a couple of CityWest trucks working on the island right now.