Broadband coming to northern Alaska on Dec. 1st …
A spokesman for the Anchorage-based company that’s building a fiber-optic cable system in northern Alaska announced this week when it’ll activate the system that will bring broadband to five northern coastal communities.
“The system will go live Dec. 1 in those northwest Alaska communities – all of them,” Quintillion spokesman Tim Woolston said Tuesday. He says that’s good news for the people who live in Nome, Kotzebue, Point Hope, Wainwright and Utqiagvik, formerly known as Barrow.
“We’re excited to finish this project and provide high-speed broadband to these communities that have needed it for so long,” he said.
The cable will supplement and in some cases replace the slower satellite-based system that’s provided substandard Internet access in those and other remote Alaskan communities for years. Woolston says Quintillion laid cable last year, but had to bring its contractors’ ships back to finish the task.
“There’s a little bit more work that needs to be done starting this July, when the ice conditions are favorable, so we can get ships back on the water,” he said.
Quintillion CEO Elizabeth Pierce says the company had to bring in the ships to use a specially designed tool to bury the cable deeply into the sea floor, to protect it from hazards like a ship dragging its anchor and the more uniquely Arctic threat of being damaged by chunks of ice scraping along the ocean floor – a hazard known as “ice gouging.”
“There can be some very deep cuts into the sea floor by that ice activity – certainly severe enough … to damage the cable,” Pierce said during a talk she gave last month at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She says the company designed a cable that would withstand Arctic conditions and a plow-like device that would bury it up to 12 feet below the ocean floor – deep enough to protect it from natural and human-caused hazards.
“That plows a trench in the sea floor and lays the cable in as it plows, so that it fills back in over the cable,” Pierce said.
She told those attending her keynote talk at UAF's Arctic Broadband Forum that the project is the first phase of what the company hopes will become a 10,000-mile system linking Asia and Europe via the Arctic.
“We decided to start the project with the hardest part first; we decided to start with Alaska.”
Pierce says Quintillion is working on plans for the next two phases of the project, which call for running a cable from Nome west to Asia and another running from Prudhoe Bay east through the Canadian Arctic and on to Europe.
