How Alaska Fights Digital Inequality

The northern regions are harsh climatic conditions, extreme temperatures and the inaccessibility of some places. In Russia, such territories are understood as the Extreme North, Yamal and a number of other regions. Naturally, these regions are sparsely populated, but the presence of a stable link living there is absolutely necessary. In the USA, our Alaska is one of such regions. There are a lot of hard-to-reach regions where there are simply no roads and any communications.

For example, the small town of Kotzebue with a population of 3,000 people is just one of those localities where stable communication is necessary, but the installation of the necessary infrastructure for this infrastructure is difficult. To install metal towers for antenna systems, a special helicopter is used here.



The tower is delivered to the nearby summit, where it is already awaited by a special team of installers. When the tower goes down low enough, it is hooked with steel wire to the already prepared foundation. After a few minutes of such intense and precise work, all four metal bases of the tower are precisely installed in the corners of the foundation.

When the installation is complete, the pilot is given a conditioned signal and he unhooks the turret from the tail. Then, active equipment is installed on the tower and it begins to transmit a signal to the world's largest zinc mine with a couple of hundreds of miners living in Kotzebue. The territory here is characterized by a dry subarctic climate, where on average just five days the entire summer temperature rises just above +20 degrees. In the extreme north, Internet connection is slow and expensive, so according to the FCC (Federal Communications Commision - Federal Communications Commission in the United States), most Alaskans rely only on expensive satellite connections at 2 Mbps dial-up speeds with a delay of 550 milliseconds (nipigirat).

Installation of the tower is the final stage in the deployment of the TERRA network - one of the most expensive telecom projects of the last year. For six years, a 5,000-kilometer ring of radio relay stations and fiber-optic lines was built around Alaska at a cost of $ 300 million.



Worth such an Internet is also not cheap. For example, residents of Kotsuba and nearby cities pay $ 60 monthly for a speed of 3 Mbit / s, and $ 150 for 6 Mbit / s.

The construction of TERRA required the installation of 109 towers, radio-relay transmitters. It is noteworthy that the construction period of six years is an incredibly large figure for a private company and it once again confirms the thesis that the construction of networks in Alaska is a very complicated process.



The TERRA network is located in a ring around southwest Alaska. Optics are marked in orange on the map, and microwave telecommunications are highlighted in yellow.


Most of the towers are installed in the villages, but 23 had to be delivered by helicopter to the mountains, in the very manner described above. As a rule, such a tower closes the span from 15 to 65 kilometers. The towers form a ring, and branches go from them to unite into a common network a dozen small villages, including Shaktoolik (with a population of 258 people), Shageluk (population 81 people) and many others.

In addition to telecommunications hardware, each tower has 48 batteries. Such a quantity of batteries is enough for the equipment on the tower to work in the autonomous region for two days. The station can also be powered by a diesel generator and a backup power generator.



Power supply to the towers is provided by two diesel generators that work around the clock. The fuel tank of one generator has a volume of 30 thousand liters. This is quite enough for one tower to work for 15 months. To fill this tank with fuel, the helicopter makes 30 visits.

Fault tolerance is one of the main principles on which TERRA has built its network. Ring topology allows you to quickly redirect traffic if one of the nodes fails.



In such systems, software is of great importance, which should control literally all the parameters of the system. From the determination of the frequency and amplitude of the carrier wave on which the signal is transmitted and ending with the priority maintenance of the traffic. The software is the basis of the performance of a network operating in the extreme conditions of the Arctic. The software allows you to route traffic remotely through a specific antenna on the tower. Control of weather conditions allows software to minimize the attenuation of radio signals.

Another problem is that waveguides (along which microwaves propagate) are hollow metal tubes connecting (for example) an amplifier and antennas. But in such harsh climatic conditions of Alaska, moisture can accumulate inside the waveguides and freeze. Therefore, the system of waveguide paths is under air pressure to periodically purge the system and thereby prevent the accumulation of moisture.

Despite the huge number of redundancy solutions, problems occasionally occur. For example, there were cases when one of the antennas was blown away by a block of ice that melted in the sun and descended from the top of the tower. In this case, the software that allows you to remotely redirect traffic from a failed antenna saves you.

No other company has ever considered it economically feasible to deliver ground-based Internet to this remote part of Alaska. The implementation of the TERRA project was made possible by the government received grants, loans and subsidies.
Even with this support, the tariffs that TERRA customers pay remain much higher than in other regions of the United States. The most expensive tariff plan in the network costs $ 300 per month. This tariff plan guarantees ping in 25 milliseconds. After years of neglect by telecommunications companies, rural Alaska is now of interest, and GCI is already facing competition, at least in a small TERRA service area. Quintillion recently installed an underwater fiber optic cable to provide broadband connectivity in villages along the northwest coast of Alaska.

This is good news for Alaska subscribers and bad for GCI - the creators of the TERRA network. The last repeater on the TERRA network was switched on in October 2017 at the point marked on the map as Final Repeater:



Currently TERRA towers have an expected lifespan of 50 to 60 years. During this time, several new generations of wireless technologies will emerge, requiring GCI to upgrade their equipment. Already, engineers have begun to replace generators at the earliest sites that have already reached their five-year service life.

GCI is already selling TERRA’s power to other telecommunications companies, which should help expand Internet access services for residents, but competitors claim that the cost of GCI is too high and accuse it of monopolizing Internet services in Alaska. Several competitors have already filed complaints with the Federal Communications Commission in the United States.

Undoubtedly, the project of the TERRA network is a fairly economically risky proposal. But this network can also be a real breakthrough, providing communications to dozens of Alaska villages that, until recently, were left without a “terrestrial” Internet.