Arctic Fibre and Quintillion bringing high speed Internet to Northwest, Arctic Alaska.

• Author: Stricker, Julie
• Position: TELECOM & TECHNOLOGY

Remember back in the mid-1990s when the Internet was referred to as the "Information Superhighway?" While that description may provide a (dated) picture of today's Internet experience in Alaska's larger cities and much of the Lower 48, most of Alaska is still in stop-and-go traffic when it comes to connectivity.

A series of initiatives and projects on the state, federal, and international levels could change that in the next few years, bringing widespread access to high-speed Internet to rural communities in much the same way electricity was built out in the previous century, an Alaska Broadband Task Force study released in October 2014 concludes. In today's world, high-speed Internet access is as integral to daily life as electricity became a century ago.

"We no longer need to debate the benefits and role that broadband plays in the community," the Alaska Broadband Task Force study states. "The use of broadband services is prevalent in nearly all that we do from trade, commerce, education, and healthcare, to finance, government services, knowledge transfer, social networking, or simply entertainment. Technology, the Internet, and connectedness are part of our daily lives."

In 2010, the federal government released a federal broadband plan that included a number of initiatives and billions of dollars in funding to spread digital literacy and access to high-speed Internet nationwide. In Alaska, Department of Commerce, Community and Economic Development Commissioner Susan Bell created the twenty-two-member Broadband Task Force in 2010 to develop a plan to accelerate the deployment, availability, and adoption of affordable broadband statewide.

It set a goal of providing every Alaskan access to 100Mbps (megabytes per second) broadband connectivity by 2020.

It's a tall order.

Low Ratings for Alaska

The study notes twenty-one thousand Alaska households lack broadband, as well as many hospitals, schools, libraries, and local governments. In 2012, Alaska ranked forty-nine out of the fifty states in broadband adoption, network quality, and economic structure by TechNet. That low rating is largely due to the state's size, small population, lack of roads, geographic diversity, and the high cost of building technology infrastructure under those conditions.

A map of the existing terrestrial broadband network in Alaska shows a line roughly following the sparse highway system from Prudhoe Bay south to Anchorage and the Kenai Peninsula, with spurs to Kodiak and the top of the Alaska Peninsula. A separate network connects a patchwork of communities in southwest Alaska via fiber and microwave. The latter, called the TERRA project, was built using a combination of loans and a one-time federal grant.

Communities outside those networks typically are connected via satellite.

The Institute of Social...