Growing up here
I grew up on a road outside Trenton where the school bus stopped four times in three kilometres. My grandfather farmed the corner lot. My dad worked at the base. I learned to drive on the same gravel concession that the BOQ install crew now strings fibre along, and the road still floods every March in the same two spots.
When people ask why I started a fibre company in Quinte West instead of moving somewhere bigger to do something easier, the honest answer is that this is the place I know. I know which roads ice over first. I know which sideroads the township paves and which ones it doesn't. I know the family at Reid's, and the woman at the counter at the pharmacy who asks about my kids by name. That kind of knowing isn't a marketing angle. It's just how it is when you stay.
22 years in Air Force communications
COMS = communications. The trade that keeps the radios, networks, and data links running so the rest of the operation can do its job.
Out of high school I joined the Air Force as a COMS tech. That's the trade that keeps the radios working when nothing else does. I spent twenty-two years doing it, in places with reliable infrastructure and places with absolutely none, and the lesson that stuck was simple. When the network is down, somebody's day is going badly. The faster you get it back, the less damage gets done. Everything else is detail.
That's not a sales pitch. That's just the trade. I came home to Quinte West, hung up the uniform, looked around at the internet options on my own road, and decided I'd rather build a network for my neighbours than sit on a porch complaining about Bell.
When the network is down, somebody's day is going badly. The faster you get it back, the less damage gets done. Everything else is detail. Brad Poirier, founder
Why the big telcos missed us
Quinte West is not a small town. It has a downtown, a CFB, a working port, three high schools, vineyards across the bay, dairy farms to the north. But it's also not Toronto. The math that head offices in Toronto run on a map looks at "homes per kilometre of trench" and decides what is profitable to dig. A street with eight houses on a kilometre of road doesn't clear the line on a spreadsheet in a high-rise.
A street with eight houses doesn't clear the line on a spreadsheet in a high-rise. It clears the line just fine when it's your own street.
So those streets get told "soon" for a decade. Soon in the announcement, soon on the map at the trade show, soon in the email from a vice-president somebody met once. And then a different vice-president gets the job, the map gets redrawn, and "soon" starts again.
A street with eight houses clears the line just fine when it's your own street. It clears the line when you've coached most of the kids on it. The economics aren't bad, they're just smaller, and they need somebody local who's not trying to clear a different bar.
The first trench
The first BOQ fibre run went in along a stretch of road I had walked for years. We had three customers signed up before the trench opened. By the end of the first afternoon we had eleven, because neighbours walked over to the truck and asked what we were doing. By the end of the first month the road was lit and a guy two doors down sent me a text at quarter past ten on a Sunday saying his speed test had jumped from 14 megabits to 940. That text is still on my phone.
We have done a lot of trenching since. Bayside, Frankford, Sidney Township. The crew now has people from Belleville and Trenton and one fellow who drives in from Stirling because his cousin works in the office. Same approach. Walk the route. Talk to the homeowners. Tidy the verge. Don't leave junk in the ditch. Don't damage the gas line that nobody bothered to mark, because we ask before we dig.
Why we answer the phone
The single most expensive thing a small ISP can do is set up a call centre. The single best thing it can do is not. Every BOQ customer has a number that goes to a real person, and that person is usually within forty minutes of your house. After hours it goes to me, or to one of two senior techs who rotate the on-call. I have taken calls at 11pm, at 2am, at 6am the morning of a holiday. Most of them get fixed in the call. The ones that don't get a truck rolling.
We're not 24/7 like a multinational. We're more like the volunteer fire department. If something is on fire you can phone, and it gets sorted.
I am not pretending we can be Bell. We can't. We don't want to. We can pretend a lot less than they can, though, and so far it's working.
What's next
Picton is on the build this year. So is most of Brighton. We're partnering with PT Corp on a backbone that lets us reach Stirling and Marmora properly in 2027. The list of properties on the rural priority list keeps growing, and every one of them is a road I'm willing to drive to.
If you're already on BOQ, thanks for staying. If you're not yet, drop your address in the checker. If we're not on your road, we'll tell you the truth about when, and we'll mean it.