Alaska telecom infrastructure expands: advancing at the speed of sound.

• Author: Stricker, Julie
• Position: SPECIAL SECTION: Telecom & Technology

In Alaska, telecommunications advances are being made at the speed of sound. Networks are expanding and getting faster, with more capacity.

Over the past five years, the state's major wireless and Internet service providers Alaska Communications, AT&T, GCI, and Verizon have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build and improve infrastructure. Network speeds and accessibility along Alaska's urban core and road system rival those of much of the Lower 48. And more improvements are in the works.

Competition 'Driving Force'

Competition is the driving force behind the speed of the changes, says David Morris, vice president of corporate services at GCI.

"Competition is good thing," says Demian Voiles, vice president for Verizon Wireless Alaska, the state's newest telecom. "It keeps the competitive juices going. It makes us all strive to be better."

And while the advertisements tout network speeds with terms like LTE, 4G, and even 5G, Voiles cautions that those are marketing terms.

"What you really need to do is pay attention to the technology underneath that," he says. "LTE is a worldwide standard that stands for Long Term Evolution of wireless, again a marketing term, but it refers to the type of technology that's being used. 5G really hasn't even been defined yet. There are advances in LTE that you'll see coming before you'll see 5G. We're entering the realm of speculation here because we have to determine as an industry what 5G is, but there's always advances coming."

Those advances mainly address improvements in speed, decreases in latency, and increases in capacity and throughput, he says.

"Then we have to have devices that can support them as well," Voiles says.

Step into any of the retail stores for Verizon, GCI, and AT&T and enter a techie wonderland filled with phones of all flavors, tablets, household gadgets, and accessories, all with that new-car smell. It's competition at work, and Alaska has been enjoying the benefits since former Senator Ted Stevens helped push the Telecommunications Act of 1996 through Congress, Morris says. The act effectively opened the industry to competition.

Before 1996, "up in Alaska, it was an exclusive monopoly," Morris says. There was no incentive to invest in new equipment as long as the profit margin remained steady. Today, with multiple major telecoms in the state, "if your competitor comes up with something newer, faster, something more whizbang, you're going to have to upgrade."

GCI has spent "north of $150 million to $170 million every year for at least five years," Morris says. Its network offers download speeds of 250 MB (megabit) per second in Anchorage, Fairbanks, Juneau, Kenai, Ketchikan, and Soldotna under its re:D...