Alaska oil patch worksite options: meeting the need for connectivity.

• Author: White, Rindi
• Position: TELECOM & TECHNOLOGY

Thanks to a drive to make remote offices truly connected, Alaska's North Slope is one of the best-connected places in the state, and the need for connectivity is increasing every year.

With competition in the oil and gas industry luring workers to other areas, such as offshore rigs in the Gulf of Mexico or the booming fields of North Dakota, some say the connectivity helps boost worker morale and keep employees in Alaska by providing access to their lives and families, whether it be video-chatting with their children in the evenings or taking online college courses.

"That's how you keep quality project staff these days," says Rick Hansen, director of GCI's Industrial Telecom division. "The joke about the camps on the Slope is it's all about the quality of the cook and the speed of the Internet."

That's not far off the mark, representatives from ConocoPhillips say. Bill Arnold, manager of North Slope Operations and Projects for ConocoPhillips, says in the early days of the oilfield, everyone used a party-line system, and workers were allowed a scant two minutes per call for every twelve-hour shift for personal use of the phones. The limit was necessary to keep the line open for work-related calls, he says. But today, expectations are different among workers, and thankfully the available technology is expanding to meet those expectations.

Connectivity Vital for Workers and Employers

GCI is at the forefront of expanded connectivity. The company is the only carrier with a division dedicated to providing engineering, procurement, and construction, or EPC, for oil-and-gas related telecom project work in Alaska. It's also the only company with a fiber-optic link to the North Slope today, a link that was established in 1996.

GCI Industrial Telecom has designed, constructed, and maintains roughly one hundred miles of fiber-optic cable to connect various sites throughout Deadhorse and Prudhoe Bay in the past decade, Hansen says. Cellular coverage has gone from one cell site tower used by all carriers to about twenty cell site towers today, he says.

In 1997, according to information supplied by GCI Industrial Telecom, all of Prudhoe Bay ran on 384 Kbps, or kilobytes per second. In 2008, that was upgraded to 60 Mbps, or megabytes per second. Construction camps just five years ago required as little as 800 Kbps. Last year, some camps were contracted for between 5 and 10 Mbps of Internet.

Most systems now operate on IP networks that require connectivity...