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Receding Sea Ice off Alaska’s Northern Coast Enables Firm to Lay Subsea Fiber-optic Cable

Receding sea ice helps bring broadband to northern Alaska …

An Anchorage-based company is taking advantage of the open ocean off the coast of Alaska to lay a 1,200-mile subsea fiber-optic cable that’ll provide faster and more reliable broadband internet connections to northern Alaska and the Interior.

“There is less ice off the coast of Alaska,” Kristina Woolston is a spokeswoman for Quintillion Networks, “and so deploying the cable at a submarine level is possible now, where it may not have been five years ago.”

Credit NSIDC
The National Snow and Ice Data Center's May 5 Arctic sea-ice coverage map shows open water off Alaska's northern coast.

Quintillion is overseeing development of the fiber-optic system that company officials say will improve connectivity throughout the Interior and bring broadband to Nome, Kotzebue, Point Hope, Wainwright and Barrow by next summer.

“There will be true broadband in these communities for the first time,” Woolston said in an interview last week after talking about the project to about 100 people at the Westmark Fairbanks Hotel and Conference Center.

Woolston says within a few years Quintillion will connect its system to a 10,000-mile cable that’ll run from Japan to Great Britain. She says Quintillion decided to begin the project in the middle, off Alaska, because the Northwest Passage, the waterway along Canada’s northwest coast, remains clogged with ice.

“The Northwest Passage, or the route that would extend from Prudhoe Bay over to Europe, has seen more ice this year than the last couple of years,” she said.

Credit Quintillion Networks
Quintillion plans to lay subsea cable off Alaska this summer to provide greater broadband capacity to North Slope telecoms, which will in turn will offer their customers must-faster internet connections that will accommodate such bandwidth-hogging applications as streaming video and gaming.

That’s one of several changes in the project since New York-based equity firm Cooper Investment Partners bought out the Toronto-based company, Arctic Fibre, that originally proposed the project and which had considered beginning it in Canada. Woolston says Cooper assigned the tasks of building, owning and operating the system to Quintillion.

“Now, it’s an Alaska-based company that is building the system,” she said.

Woolston says Quintillion plans to initially deliver broadband capacity from the south, through another subsea fiber-optic cable extending from the Pacific Northwest to Anchorage. From there, the company will use existing fiber-optic lines that follow the highway system to Prudhoe Bay.

She says within a few years Quintillion plans to extend the cable westward from Nome to Japan, then eastward from Prudhoe Bay to the U.K. And then provide internet connectivity using its new subsea cable to the north.

Tim has worked in the news business for over three decades, mainly as a newspaper reporter and editor in southern Arizona. Tim first came to Alaska with his family in 1967, and grew up in Delta Junction before emigrating to the Lower 48 in 1977 to get a college education and see the world.