Purple Cow Internet has expanded its Purple Fibre network to Fairview and Fairmount, roughly doubling the number of homes in Halifax Regional Municipality that can get the service.

That’s a bigger deal than a typical service expansion. Purple Cow started out like most small internet providers, reselling access to Bell’s and Eastlink’s networks under CRTC wholesale rules, and grew to more than 40,000 households across Atlantic Canada without laying a foot of its own fibre. Building a physical network from scratch is normally something only the big incumbents do, and Purple Cow has begun doing it anyway, street by street, funding each new build with revenue from the customers it already has.

The Halifax-based provider says the network is the first XGSPON fibre-to-the-home deployment in Atlantic Canada. The plan on offer is $60 a month for 2 Gbps download and 2 Gbps upload, with a Wi-Fi 6 router included, free installation and no contract. Purple Cow says that is roughly what many households pay Bell or Eastlink for 100 Mbps cable service.

The independents that own their fibre are a short list, and none of them operate in Atlantic Canada. A Toronto-based company called Beanfield has built its own network in a few large Ontario, Quebec and B.C. cities, but mostly inside condo and apartment towers rather than to individual houses. A handful of small telcos in rural southwestern Ontario own their local networks too, some dating back generations, but none of it extends anywhere near the East Coast. As far as Haligonia could find, Purple Cow is the only independent provider in Atlantic Canada building fibre directly to houses on residential streets.

The timing is not accidental. Since May 2024, the CRTC has required Bell and Telus to open their fibre networks to competitors for a fee. Bell answered a February 2025 expansion of that policy by cutting $500 million in planned investment and slowing its fibre build by 1.5 million locations. Smaller providers have complained the wholesale rates leave them little room to compete on price, with TekSavvy telling the regulator that incumbents sometimes charge retail customers less than the wholesale rate competitors must pay.

Founder and CEO Bradley Farquhar said the wholesale rules are what got Purple Cow started, and the limits of that model are why it is now building.

“I’m honestly grateful to the CRTC for the wholesale access rules that let Purple Cow get started,” Farquhar said. “Those regulations gave us the ability to build our herd to over 40,000 households by leveraging the incumbent network to transport our internet, and we wouldn’t be here without them. But renting somebody else’s pipes was never going to change the industry forever. If we want the Atlantic provinces to go from being the most expensive place in Canada for telecommunications to being the least expensive, we have to build our own network, pole by pole. Fairview and Fairmount are two more steps in that direction.”

“Every household that switches to Purple Fibre is helping fund the next street, the next neighbourhood, the next community,” he said. “We don’t have the incumbents’ balance sheet. What we have is customers who are tired of getting squeezed and want to build something better. Fairview and Fairmount are the next people we get to prove it to.”

Purple Fibre runs on XGSPON, a fibre-to-the-home standard that delivers the same multi-gigabit speed in both directions over a single line. Purple Cow says residential speeds on the network reach 8 Gbps.

In a post on its blog, the company calls Fairmount “milestone #2” and says it is already scouting where the network goes next.

The company was named Best Internet Plan and Best Value Plan for Halifax by PlanHub, an independent telecom comparison platform, and is the highest-rated internet service provider in Canada on Google.

Fairview and Fairmount residents can check whether their address is covered at purplecowinternet.com/purplefibre or by calling or texting 902-800-2660.

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