Throughout the past 20 years, the Lower 48 has seen
the deployment of high speed broadband, 3 & 4 G wireless
services, and IT Cloud services grow and become commodity
expectations for both consumers and businesses. However,
these same modern products and capabilities have eluded
these northern Alaska communities, where the cost of inferior
broadband delivered over satellite and microwave is 185 times
the U.S. average!
I’ll share some examples of the impacts. Until Quintillion
brought fiber, data speeds
were not sufficient for health
providers using electronic
health records. State-of-the-art
hospitals and clinics in many
rural hub communities have
the latest medical and imaging
equipment, but it hasn’t been
effectively utilized due to the
lack of available bandwidth.
A rural hospital could take a
Computerized Tomography
(CT) scan of a patient, but
the digital image could not be sent for evaluation due to the
absence of proper bandwidth. Instead, patients needing a
CT scan had to be medevac’d to Anchorage, at upwards of
$100,000 per trip. I can report that adequate, affordable band-
width is eliminating the need for many of those costly trips
and saving valuable time.
As with health care, education in these isolated commu-
nities is extremely challenging. Being able to leverage virtual
classrooms and online training programs can substantially
improve education programs and available curriculum with-
out adding substantial cost. Access to state-of-the art-training
and materials will help attract and retain quality teachers, a
significant challenge in our
state, especially in remote,
austere communities.
For consumers, the
change is just as vivid. One
resident of Wainwright, popu-
lation 600, told me that before
Quintillion went live, it took
him a day and a half to down-
load Windows Anniversary
Edition. Others joked to me
that as they tried to down-
load a movie they had to wait
through seemingly endless buffering and forgot which movie
they were watching.
Our network is now providing access to high speed
broadband capacity for telecommunication service providers
at lower cost and improved quality of service than existing
satellite and microwave options. Quintillion’s infrastructure
is enabling isolated communities to connect to the outside
world. My take on history is that true high-speed internet
spurs innovation and economic development.
In the first months of service, we’re thrilled to see that
residents are already seeing benefits. One school has seen its
internet bill cut by two thirds. Downloads are faster. Busi-
nesses are able to order supplies faster. One community has a
public center offering free wi-fi and video conferencing. Art-
ists are planning to sell their crafts online. In Nome, finishing
point of the famed Iditarod Trail Sled Dog race, city leaders
believe Quintillion’s system
will hasten its quest to build a
deep-water port to accommo-
date cruise ships.
In addition, Quintillion’s
new terrestrial fiber, installed
last year between Fairbanks
and Prudhoe Bay, con-
nects these northern Alaska
communities to the Pacific
Northwest, as well as serving
the Prudhoe Bay oil fields,
North America’s largest oil
and gas field. As Alaskans, we’re celebrating increased oil and
gas exploration and production prospects both onshore and
offshore, creating even more opportunity where we built our
world-class network.
Completing the Alaska phase is a significant step for
Quintillion’s groundbreaking project. The design took years.
Every inch of the ocean floor route was analyzed and mapped.
We hired the best in the business to construct and install the
cable, all of it buried in the seabed employing a variety of
installation techniques, including 2-, 3-, and, for the first time,
a 4-meter sea plough. At the shore-end, the cable is buried in
steel conduit up to 24 meters deep to protect against interfer-
ence from humans and natural
conditions in the Arctic, as
well as to protect the coastline
from activity that would con-
tribute to erosion.
We worked closely with
co-management groups to
schedule installation in con-
sideration of marine mam-
mal migratory patterns. My
company further invested in
the protection of marine life by
employing full-time Protected
Species Observers to monitor the presence of Arctic wildlife
24/7.
The Quintillion team, including the roughly dozen
contractors and service providers, overcame considerable
challenges, including operating in a short, harsh and unpre-
dictable Arctic construction season. During the summer of
2016 there were more than 400 individuals working in five
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