The CRTC has given Telus more time to finish two Broadband Fund mobile projects in Quebec after the carrier blamed weather-related safety delays at several tower sites.
One order covers about 35 kilometres of Routes 204, 283 and 389, plus seven communities including Lac-Frontière, Saint-Adalbert and Sainte-Félicité. Telus had already pushed that job into summer 2026. The Commission has now approved a new finish date of December 29, 2026. Funding for that build sits at up to about $4.5 million.
The second order covers roughly 132 kilometres along Route 138 and service in Rivière-au-Tonnerre and Rivière-Saint-Jean. That project’s deadline moves to November 3, 2026. Funding there is capped at just over $3 million after earlier scope and cost changes. In both cases the CRTC said Telus had made “substantial progress” and that the weather delays were beyond the company’s reasonable control.
The Commission first selected the Quebec mobile packages years ago under its Broadband Fund, which backs cellphone and internet builds in places the market will not serve on its own. Telus has also been busy on other Quebec connectivity work, including a 125-kilometre underwater backup cable meant to keep the North Shore online when land routes fail, after Ottawa and Telus first broke ground on that project.
Highway corridors like Route 138 are the kind of stretches where a dead zone is more than an inconvenience on a winter drive. A few more months of weather holds is annoying if you live there, but it beats half-finished towers going up in a storm. Still, people along these routes have been waiting on better coverage for a while.
Would a November or December finish date change how you plan a road trip through those corridors, or are you still packing the paper map just in case?
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