Building and operating a network across Alaska’s vast distances, over rugged terrain, and in harsh Arctic climates can be a challenge. Fortunately, GCI’s teams have decades of experience operating in Arctic environments. In addition to spanning rivers, lakes, frozen tundra and massive mountain ranges, GCI’s network also extends to one of the most surprisingly safe and predictable environments on earth – along the sea floor.
When fiber is laid far beneath the water’s surface, service interruptions due to broken or damaged fiber are far less frequent than those of its overland counterparts. That reality has come into sharp focus over the past few months as torrential rains, unprecedented flooding, and devastating landslides wreaked havoc across the Pacific Northwest, causing significant damage throughout the region including extended interruptions to internet and phone service due to damaged terrestrial fiber networks.
Power outages and long-term loss of connectivity throughout the Pacific Northwest, including Canada, has frustrated local businesses, internet users, and caused concerns for first responders. Alaska, fortunately, avoided the brunt of these storms, but the impact of outages in the Lower 48 has been felt in networks relying solely on terrestrial land fiber for backhaul network services.
These episodes could potentially increase in frequency in the future as the changing climate causes more severe shifts in weather, including a weather phenomenon called “atmospheric rivers,” which scientists say have become more frequent in the region.
While fiber breaks to individual homes and businesses can easily be resolved, breaks in long-haul fiber connecting Alaska to the larger internet, regardless of the cause, can be much more complicated to fix. This is why GCI has invested in network resiliency. GCI’s Alaska United West undersea fiber runs from Anchorage to Seward to Warrenton, Oregon and its fully diverse counterpart, Alaska United East, runs from Anchorage to Whittier to Norma Beach in Washington. This provides Alaskans with diverse, reliable connectivity.
As has been made evident by extensive damage and outages caused by wind, rain, and mudslides in British Columbia (BC) recently, terrestrial communications infrastructure can be very vulnerable when mother nature isn’t cooperative. The seafloor can certainly be viewed as an extreme environment, but it’s also subject to fewer and far less frequent environmental and manmade events that can damage fiber optic cable, making for a significantly more predictable situation.
According to Canadian CBC news reports, severe wind and rain in November caused landslides and significant flooding in areas of British Columbia, bringing down power grids and communications networks. Weather conditions also brought road closures, delaying infrastructure repairs for weeks.
Alaska, even more so than BC, is an extreme place. Unpredictable weather, natural disasters, or even heavy equipment damaging a fiber line can take down an entire network. The water might be roiling at or near the surface during a storm, but the seafloor deep below remains generally unaffected. Subsea fiber may occasionally be damaged by fishing equipment, an anchor, or by underwater earthquakes and the like, but the fiber path is clearly marked on nautical charts and the route is carefully planned to minimize environmental impact. This makes subsea fiber a much more reliable and resilient option than terrestrial routes.
GCI’s redundant, ringed network structure ensures services remain largely unaffected even if a section of subsea fiber is damaged. GCI invests more than $1.5 million per year to keep a dedicated cable repair ship on call 24/7/365 to ensure any damaged fiber is repaired as quickly as possible.
GCI also added another layer of network resiliency throughout the state last summer with the announcement of a 10-year, $150 million partnership with Intelsat, a global leader in satellite service. The partnership dramatically expanded GCI’s geosynchronous satellite capacity and can act as a backup to provide services when other delivery technologies experience outages.
Fiber is the gold standard for connectivity and GCI is committed to building out its fiber optic network wherever feasible. GCI has decades of fiber optic experience and we firmly believe that subsea fiber is the best, most efficient, most resilient, and environmentally friendly road to further closing the digital divide in Alaska.
GCI owns and operates approximately 5,500 miles of subsea fiber, more than any other Alaska carrier, and will be deploying an additional 800+ miles in 2022 as part of its AU-Aleutians Fiber Project.