In the early 1980s, I was a bank manager in Kotzebue, Alaska, 33 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Those were the days of handwritten checks, paper records, and hand-updated documents. When broadband brought high-speed internet to Alaska, all that paper went digital, and residents never looked back—until last month, when an act of nature took them offline again.
A subsea fiber system from Prudhoe Bay to Nome began service in 2017, bringing high-speed internet service to North Slope and Northwest Arctic communities, US military assets, and Alaska’s North Slope oil fields. The system, owned by the private global communications corporation Quintillion, carries traffic for retail internet providers and government communications systems.
In the last few years, however, two ice-scouring events have sliced the cable buried in the Beaufort Sea, knocking out service to the Northern and Western coasts of Alaska, including Kotzebue and the entire Northwest Arctic region. In June 2023, an iceberg – something only those living in the Arctic region of the US deal with – dragging along the seabed severed the broadband fiber cable that kept many parts of Alaska connected. It was thought to be a “once in a lifetime” cut, but then last month, it happened again.
Read more in RealClearEnergy here.
The views and opinions expressed are those of the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of C3.
