Arctic Fibre Inc. was established in 2009 to review the physical, technical and economic obstacles to the development of a fibre optic telecommunications network in the Canadian Arctic. Subsequent studies determined that the Arctic ice cap had receded enough to permit the installation of a 15,600 km network between Tokyo and London through the southern portion of the North West Passage and that ice scour issues were manageable.

In the past two years the incremental bandwidth provided by the upgrade from 10 gigabit wavelengths to 40G wavelengths has provided the economies of scale necessary to construct the system. The design of Arctic Fibre has been undertaken at 40G but the network may be upgraded to 100G as that technology is refined and proven prior to the construction of the backbone in 2014Q4.