The world is moving faster than ever — but for Calgary residents Laurie and Chris Softley, things have really slowed down lately.
“Nobody’s been able to tell us when it’s going to be fixed. Nobody,” Chris explained.
The Softleys returned home from vacation to their home in Calgary’s Dalhousie neighbourhood late in the evening of Aug. 3 and when they woke up the next morning, they realized their Wi-Fi wasn’t working.
“The first person I talked to said, ‘Let me see if I can reboot your boxes from here,'” Chris said. “I said, ‘You cannot reboot the boxes because there’s no wire going to our house.'”
The Softleys are one of hundreds of Calgary-area Telus customers who have been without cable, internet and phone service for more than a week, as the company says it’s dealing with a rash of copper theft incidents.
“In Ogden, cable cut damage is affecting home phone, internet, and TV services. In Kingsland and Bowness, home phone services are being affected,” a Telus spokesperson said in a statement.
“As the price of copper has risen, so has the instance of theft affecting numerous industries including telecom, construction, electricity, and natural gas.”
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Telus says copper thefts have doubled in 2026 compared to just a year ago.
“While thieves are typically after copper cables, they often cut through nearby fibre cables during their acts of vandalism, disrupting critical services to even more customers.”
Roughly 1,600 Telus customers alone have been affected by the thefts this month, according to the company.
“(Telecommunications cables) are fairly easy to see, easy to access, because they need to be that way so the workers can get to them,” Calgary Police Sgt. Nick Wilsher said.
“This also affects all emergency communications. It impacts hospitals, it impacts agriculture as well… It can shut down whole irrigation systems, and then farmers lose crops.“
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The Softleys are on day 11 with no internet at their home.
“There’s no excuse for that length of time to take to repair something in this day and age,” Chris said.
“We’ve got neighbours that work from home… what are they going to do?”
Chris and Laurie estimate they’ve spent more than 10 hours on the phone with the company’s customer service line and appear to be no closer to a resolution.
“Can we just please have our services back? That’s all we’re asking.”
Telus looks like the culprit here. The province needs to crack down on cooper resale. This couple while they think they will now get a better deal with Rogers, who also uses coax cable which is also copper has been susceptible to copper theft. Rogers also has many outages due to copper theft. Basically, the culprit is copper theft and switching carriers does nothing to give a reliable home service. Look at the size of the cable they showed. Telus is converting their network to Fiber optics for better speed and reliability and should eliminate copper theft.
I get 260 GB of data with my phone service.. it’s only 40.00.per month
What’s stopping these people from using Internet exactly ? Their un smartness ?
The picture of the “fiber optic” cable looks like it is a lot of copper wires. Fiber optic cables are not that thin and not that numerous.