Alaska's can-do approach to telecommunications: from telegraph to broadband.

• Author: Hudson, Heather E.
• Position: TELECOM & TECHNOLOGY

Overcoming the challenges of connecting Alaskans scattered in remote communities to each other and to the rest of the world has required both technological ingenuity and a commitment to provide service where networks are costly to build and maintain and customers are few. However, the story of connecting Alaskans involves much more than technological innovation and geographical challenges of vast distances and extreme climate--it includes advocacy by government agencies and the private sector, innovative strategies to attract investment, persistence by Alaska politicians and entrepreneurs, and creative techniques of putting telecommunications to use for Alaska's development.

"Connecting Alaskans: Telecommunications in Alaska from Telegraph to Broadband" is a book I wrote that was published last year. This article is a snapshot of the book, which highlights the technologies, investments, and ingenuity that have helped to link Alaskans with each other and with the outside world. In the book and this article, I also analyze the technical, policy, and regulatory issues that Alaskans have faced from the first telegraph line to the broadband era and highlights some of the lessons learned and issues that still need to be addressed.

Linking Alaskans

After an aborted private sector venture in the 1860s to construct a telegraph line from the United States and then-British west coast through Russian Alaska and Siberia to Europe, it was thirty-five years before a telegraph line would actually be built across Alaska. Led by Captain Billy Mitchell, the US military overcame obstacles of frozen tundra in the winter and muskeg and mosquitoes in the summer to build a telegraph line to link its garrisons, initially relying on a link through the Yukon to reach Skagway, where messages were sent by ship to Seattle. Eventually, submarine cables were laid from southeast Alaska to Washington State to complete an all US route.

First known as WAMCATS (the Washington-Alaska Military Cable and Telegraph System) and later ACS (the Alaska Communication System), the military's network carried both civilian and military traffic, but was owned and operated by the military until privatized by an Act of Congress in 1969, and sold to RCA (the Radio Corporation of America). Thus, for much of the twentieth century, Alaska's communications system resembled government-owned networks in Europe rather than the commercially-owned and operated networks in the United States. Like European operators, the ACS received federal government allocations for operations and maintenance and could not re-invest its own revenues but had to turn them over to the US Treasury. Despite growth in Alaska's population and economy, there was little incentive for the military to upgrade and expand facilities for civilian services. However, World War II and the Cold War did provide the rationale and funding to improve military communications, with new technologies such as the White Alice troposcatter system and the US portion of the DEW (Distant Early Warning) Line built to enhance national security on the northern Pacific and Arctic frontiers.

Reliable Communications

In the Bush, high frequency radios had been the only link between most villages and doctors, police, and government agencies. These two-way radios were often both unreliable and inaccessible. In the early 1970s, experiments using NASA's ATS-1 satellite to link Alaska village clinics to regional hospitals demonstrated that reliable voice communications could make a difference in rural healthcare, not only to get help in emergencies but also to enable doctors at regional hospitals to advise village health aides on diagnosis and treatment of their patients. Educators and...