Fiber optic cables are the informational super-highways of the communications industry. With high speeds and no stoplights, fiber connectivity is the fastest and most-direct way to transmit data from Point A to Point B. Whether it’s an actual highway, like I-10 – the 26-lane behemoth connecting the urban sprawls of Houston and San Antonio – or a fiber line delivering Facetime calls and financial information from Anchorage to Fairbanks, the capacity never seems to be enough and the demand is always growing.
GCI owns and operates more than 8,250 miles of fiber-optic cable, more than any other Alaska carrier – for reference, the state of Alaska touts a little more than 1,080 miles of highway. Of that, approximately 5,500 miles of GCI fiber lie far below the water’s surface; 2.5-inch wide or smaller cables made up of hair-like strands of glass protected by steel and a waterproof coating connecting the state to data centers in the Pacific Northwest and beyond.
Alaska is a complicated and restrictive puzzle of state, federal and private land separated from the Lower 48 by international borders. That, combined with the vast distance, Alaska’s unforgiving topography and extreme climate, makes permitting and deploying fiber optic cable over land a long and expensive process with no guarantee of success. This has made subsea fiber a proverbial lifeline for Alaskans.
Unraveling miles and miles of fiber-optic cable from giant coils in ship’s tanks sounds like it should be simple enough, but the process of establishing and maintaining the gold standard of connectivity for Alaskans is complex and rife with challenges.
Throughout my 30-year career, I’ve had the opportunity to travel the world installing fiber cables, but once I arrived in Alaska, I’ve experienced a seemingly limitless supply of new and unique problems to solve. Deploying fiber has required GCI to work around inlets that freeze entirely in the winter, and with bore tide waves and strong currents that cause the sea floor sediments to continuously churn. We’ve had to learn about working in smaller bodies of water like Lake Iliamna or Lake Eyak that require small boats instead of large barges or ships, and maintain safe and non-impacting operations to comply with all local, state and federal regulations that protect our waterways and the creatures that rely on these habitats.
And that’s only part of the equation. Once we’ve finished laying the fiber beneath the waves, we have to be capable of maintaining it. From human activity, like heavy-duty fishing gear and ship anchors, to natural occurrences, like sea ice, tidal currents and seismic activity, our subsea infrastructure can be impacted. And though the cables rarely break, it is possible and is costly and time-consuming to fix.
The time and costs associated with repairing a subsea fiber are only compounded in an Arctic climate where much of the sea is frozen under icepack that can be more than 10 feet thick for six months of the year making maintenance impossible. If a subsea Arctic fiber cable were to break, all repairs would be postponed until breakup. In the northern parts of the state, that could take as long as nine months, making satellite and microwave connectivity a more practical solution for the time being.
Repairing subsea fiber is so challenging and critical, GCI retains a fiber-repair ship year-round at a cost of more than $2 million per year in order to be able to respond immediately to any breaks in Alaska’s ice-free southern waters.
Delivering connectivity to Alaska, from the state’s urban hubs to the most rural communities, is complex. But, regardless of how exactly connectivity is delivered to your community, subsea fiber is the backbone connecting us to the rest of the world.
I believe a quote in a March 2019 New York Times article phrased it best, “People think that data is in the cloud, but it’s not. It’s in the ocean.”