Kenora is a two hours drive from Winnipeg, it's not nearly as inaccessible as you're making it out to be. However, with that said, I saw numbers saying that la

Kenora is a two hours drive from Winnipeg, it's not nearly as inaccessible as you're making it out to be. However, with that said, I saw numbers saying that laying one mile of fiber costs to the tune of $30k, so just connecting Winnipeg to Kenora would cost some $4M. Kenora itself has an area of 80 sq mi and a population of 15k people (though mostly concentrated near Lake of Woods). It's not nothing, but also not exactly a gold mine for telecoms, to be sure. Timmins might be a better example. It's more than 400 miles north of Toronto, and has some 40k people. Sudbury is half way there and has some 160k people, but still some 250 miles away from Toronto. To give a sense of scale, the distance from Timmins to Toronto is bigger than the distance from Amsterdam (Netherlands) to Berlin (Germany). 200k potential customers is a pretty decent size market (that's a quarter of San Francisco's population, for example), but covering 400 miles w/ fiber at $30k/mile just to reach it comes out to a cool $12M upfront investment. Don't forget this is just to connect two points, there's still last mile coverage and ongoing maintenance which is going to add quite a bit of cost on top. If a single competitor is there, that can cut into the profits pretty deeply. That's the sort of math that telecoms need to deal with when doing ROI analyses on these markets.