Alaska's new connection to the lower 48: bigger, better, faster connection will serve for decades.

• Author: Colby, Kent L.
• Position: TECHNOLOGY

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Plate tectonics have kept Alaska on the move since the beginning of time. The Juan de Fuca Plate and the North American Plate--along with convergent, divergent, and transform boundaries, and subduction--keep Alaska on the go. Some say the state will eventually slip down the West Coast until we are adjacent to our southerly brethren. (This may take a few million or even billion years.)

Alaska Communications Systems (ACS) has chosen not to wait. As you read this, the company is in the process of its final testing and switch to a new fiber optic cable that will stretch from Alaska to Florence, Ore., (scheduled for traffic the first quarter of 2009). At $175 million, this new connection is one of largest telecom infrastructure projects in the last decade--not only in Alaska, but also across the United States, says Steve Gerbert, ACS director of project management.

Gerbert also notes the installation of this new undersea fiber optic cable moves the company from a legacy telephone company to an integrated telecom solutions provider. With headquarters in Anchorage, ACS is already one of Alaska's leading providers of broadband and other wireline and wireless services. The evolving company builds communications solutions to both enterprise and mass-market customers.

Monikered AKORN for the Alaska Oregon Network, the cable takes a different route from the other three existing, long-haul fiber routes. In April, ACS announced it would acquire Crest Communication, the owner of Northstar, one of the existing three links. That purchase should close by year-end. With AKORN and Northstar, ACS will serve Alaskans with two diverse submarine routes. This provides ACS customers with two distinct paths (one to Seattle and one to Portland/Florence, Ore.); two network-monitoring centers; and unique meshed MPLS-converged networks throughout the state. Fiber ties ACS customers in Fairbanks to Anchorage, as well as to an undersea connection on the Northstar link to Juneau. Forward thinking ACS included in the AKORN link a branching unit on the sea floor ready to tie Southeast Alaska to the 2.6 terabit link. (A terabit (Tbps) is one trillion binary digits per second.)

To bring that speed into perspective, the new link is capable of delivering 33,000,000 simultaneous phone calls, downloading 320 sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica per second, or 35 feature-length movies, or 457 CDs in a second. This is the state's fastest link and "latest and...