OPINION: North Slope broadband outage illustrates Alaska’s need for redundant networks

Of all the federal infrastructure investments anticipated in Alaska over the next decade, nothing has the power to transform our economy and quality of life as significantly as high-speed internet and broadband connectivity.

However, as we’ve seen with the recent broadband outage in Northern and Northwest Alaska, we need to invest in increasing the redundancy of our systems if Alaska is going to compete in today’s globally connected economy.

Modern life depends on reliable, high-speed internet. It provides access to health care, education, remote work and economic opportunity. Wireless data services, video conferencing, credit card processing, mapping and navigation, emergency systems, search and rescue, and a host of other real-time mobile applications require a reliable broadband connection.

But building broadband capacity is complicated and expensive. Our small population is spread over a large geographical area, which makes the economics of communications infrastructure particularly challenging. Harsh building environments, extreme weather, limited local resources, high shipping costs, and short building seasons make construction costs five to 10 times higher than in the Lower 48. Ongoing operation and maintenance costs are higher than elsewhere for similar reasons.

Despite these inherent economic and technical challenges, over the last several years companies like Quintillion, Pacific Dataport and OneWeb have made significant private investments to diversify Alaska’s legacy communications infrastructure.

Quintillion, for example, provides backhaul, high-speed broadband, and cloud services via a 1200-mile subsea fiber optic line running from Nome to Prudhoe, and a 500-mile terrestrial fiber along the Dalton Highway corridor to Fairbanks. They wholesale high-speed internet to local telecoms and existing internet service providers in communities throughout Alaska’s Northwest and North Slope region. Broadband distribution partnerships like these are increasing market competition, building critical network redundancy, and helping drive cost, service, and reliability improvements for local businesses and residents.

But no system is impervious to the extreme weather hazards we regularly confront in Alaska.

In June, an ice-scouring event in the Beaufort Sea severed the subsea portion of Quintillion’s fiber cable, causing the first system-wide outage since the network came online in 2017. Fortunately, Quintillion was able to source backup broadband capacity via satellite while waiting for sea ice to clear to make cable repairs.

The incident underscores the need to build more resiliency and redundancy into our state’s broadband network. We must ensure communities stay connected, and that services essential to life and safety remain functioning and secure.

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) authorized $42.5 billion in federal funding to build quality, high-speed internet around the country. Alaska has received $600 million in various broadband grants to date and is expected to receive another $1.0 billion to connect 200-plus unserved and underserved communities across the state.

In June, Quintillion received an $89 million grant to help extend their sub-sea fiber from Nome to Homer. The project will add important new capacity, resiliency, and redundancy to Alaska’s internet backbone by closing the fiber network ring circling the state and allowing internet traffic to be rerouted when an act of nature occurs.

Maximizing these huge public and private broadband investments will be hard work, and take significant coordination between state, local, and tribal governments, native corporations, and most importantly, private industry.

Alaska needs an “all of the above” broadband strategy, that appropriately considers the challenges associated with building and maintaining major infrastructure in our state. Fiber is a favored technology for its speed, reliability, and bandwidth, but it’s never going to be the complete solution for Alaska. Satellite, fixed wireless, and other technologies are viable options in very remote and high-cost areas, but inevitably it’s going to take a robust mix of technologies to build a resilient and redundant network across the state. Local service providers, both public and private, tribal entities, cooperatives, and local government entities also have a responsibility to invest in upgrading their infrastructure to ensure the uninterrupted delivery of products, services, and emergency response. They’re part of a complex, integrated communications system that keeps Alaska connected to the rest of the world.

All of us want faster speeds and lower latency — the ability to upload, download, and process information quickly. But we also need a redundant and resilient statewide system that can ensure we don’t go dark. We simply can’t squander this once-in-a-generation opportunity that is so critical to Alaska’s future.

Miles Baker has spent the past 20 years working to develop public infrastructure in Alaska in his work for the Legislature, Alaska Gasline Development Corp., the University of Alaska and Sen. Lisa Murkowski. Most recently, he was Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s infrastructure investment coordinator, overseeing the implementation of the federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act on the state’s behalf.

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