Northerners once again lost Internet and telephone services Wednesday afternoon, when a fibre optic cable was damaged in northern B.C.

But thanks to a new auto re-routing system installed this year, limited Internet and wireless services were available within half an hour of the accidental cut.

An environmental company working just south of the B.C.-Yukon border damaged the cable while boring test holes at about 4 p.m. yesterday, Northwestel Inc. reported today.

"The company had obtained cable information from Northwestel for other sites where they were working, but had not requested location for this particular site,” the telecommunications company said in a press release.

"It was one of those end-of-the-day situations, I guess,” Northwestel spokeswoman Anne Kennedy said this morning. "They were probably just trying to finish up... and they dug into a gravel pit where we had our cable.”

In fact, the Northwestel crew scheduled to go to the site and mark the cable locations today or tomorrow was the one which ended up being on hand to fix the problem. The crew was relatively nearby, in the Rancheria area, and prepared to deal with the situation.

"Fortunately, the crew had equipment with them to repair fibre optic cable, which helped to expedite the repairs,” Northwestel reported.

"Normally this equipment would have to be transported from either Whitehorse or Fort Nelson, which would add to the length of the outage.

"As well, shortly after the fibre cut interrupted services, Northwestel's system automatically re-routed telecommunications traffic from the fibre optic cable to the digital microwave system that is still in place along the Alaska Highway.”

Northwestel switched from the lower-capacity microwave system to the fibre optic cable a year ago this month, Kennedy said, but left the old system in place for scenarios like this one and created an automatic re-route.

"Previously, this was a manual process that would have taken several hours to complete,” according to the company press release.

"We hadn't had a chance to test it out, but it worked very well,” she said. Service was still affected, however, because the microwave system can't transfer the same bulk of information, as the cables.

"Some banks I spoke to were still without service after the back-up system came on, "Kennedy said today, "because it just can't handle all our needs.”

Kennedy said the back-up system is part of the company's "ongoing steps to try and minimize interruptions to our customers.”

Cut cables are a significant problem for the company. In August, the Yukon lost service three times in as many days because of contractors who inadvertently dug into the Northwestel system.

As Kennedy pointed out, Wednesday's outage was fairly easy to attend to because it was within Northwestel's territory.

When cuts, like the ones which occurred in August, are made on cables outside Northwestel's purview, the company has to simply sit and wait until the problem is solved by the cable's owner.

To avoid this, it is creating more back-up systems, Kennedy said. Currently, Northwestel is installing a $9-million back-up link along the Liard Highway, Kennedy said, which should be complete by next summer.

Another would connect the Canadian North with the underwater fibre optic system which comes into Skagway.

"These are things that would not bring any additional income to Northwestel ... so we are looking for other partners in that, for instance, government,” Kennedy said.

Responding to the calls for compensation to customers for lost service, and as a result, lost business and work hours, which invariably follow an outage, Kennedy said Northwestel can only recoup the cost of repairs to the system from the guilty party.

"(Repairs are) really the only cost we can assess,” she said. "We have no way of assessing how much business is lost with something like this.”

According to Northwestel, services affected Wednesday included: data and Internet, cell phones and wireless services, Point of Sale machines, and long distance telephone.