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If you live in Anchorage or another urban area with high speed internet, think back to the days of the dial-up modem. Remember how slow and annoying that was? Now you can empathize with Rural Alaskans, who still struggle with a slow and cumbersome satellite system.
But once GCI’s Project TERRA-Southwest is completed, all that will change for about 65 communities in Western Alaska.
TERRA is an acronym for “Terrestrial for Every Region in Alaska,” a tall order. But the project’s mission for now is to bring high speed internet service to Bristol Bay and the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta.
“This is the largest project GCI has done to date,” says Jimmy Sipes, who is Vice President of Network Services for the Alaska telecommunications company. “And this is very much like fielding an army. It’s all about logistics.”
Sipes is also GCI’s chief engineer and in his 29 years with the company, this has been his most challenging project. Timing, Sipes says, has been critical. One of the big hurdles: getting all the construction materials and equipment on barges to Dillingham, one of the staging areas for Project TERRA.
“We had to catch the rivers at high water, during the spring run-off in order to get the cranes in,” says Sipes. “We had to catch the mountain-tops, just as the snow melted off, because we have a very short construction season.”
Building an information super highway in a region with no roads requires a completely different approach, especially when it runs across wilderness, that includes a federal wildlife refuge.
To get around the geographic challenges, engineers designed a hybrid communications network, that uses a mix of fiber optic cable and series of microwave relays. The new system required the construction of nine microwave towers, four mountain-top repeaters and more than 400 miles of cable, which is buried under tundra, rivers, lakes, and the sea.
Earlier this summer, crews began laying cable in Homer, where they extended it across Cook Inlet, to Williamsport in the Lake Iliamna area.
Cable was also dropped into Lake Iliamna, one of Alaska’s deepest lakes and about sixty miles from end to end. To lay the cable so that it would conform to the lake bed, GCI had to survey the lake’s underwater contours, which had never been done before.
GCI also wound up installing two underwater cables in Lake Iliamna, to provide a back-up.
“Should you get a break of that cable during the winter months,” said Sipes, “you will not be able to recover the cable to repair it until the ice goes out.”
Initially, GCI had considered skirting part of the Bristol Bay coast with cable, but decided on the microwave relay, because of sea ice.
Sipes says there’s very little knowledge about the movement of ice and sediments and their impact on cable in Alaskan waters. To learn more, GCI conducted extensive research on an undersea cable in Turnagain Arm, installed as a back-up line in case of an avalanche or other problems that might disrupt service.
The cable went in south of Anchorage, near the train museum at Potter Marsh and connected to Portage and Whittier. The studies on this segment of GCI’s fiber optic system helped make decisions about Project TERRA-Southwest.
“We looked at constructing a fiber optic cable under water from Dillingham around to Bethel, and we had to consider the possibility of a break in the cable during the period of time when its covered by ice,” said Sipes. “And the only way we could address the availability was to lay in a second cable, which would make the project economically unfeasible.”
Building redundancy into the system added to the costs, as well as getting the necessary state and federal permits.
Martin Cary, who is Vice President and General Manager of Broadband Services for GCI, says Project TERRA required more than 120 permits.
“It’s the most complicated federal permitting job we’ve ever dealt with,” says Cary. “It’s turned out to be more complicated than we imagined.”
One of the biggest challenges was getting permits to install two repeaters on mountain-tops in the Togiak National Wildlife Refuge.
