Broadband Ready: Nonprofits, tribes, and businesses bring reliable internet to rural Alaska.

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

"We believe that however tribes are bringing broadband to their communities is a game-changer, whether it's by cable or satellite," says Teresa Jacobsson. "For some of our rural communities, cable is not going to happen, not anytime soon." Jacobsson is founder and chair of Alaska Tribal Administrators Association (ATAA), a nonprofit created to support healthy tribal administration in Alaska.

About 60,000 Alaska residents have no access to broadband, while another 200,000 have limited access to low-end broadband that fails to go beyond 10Mbps download and 1Mbps upload speeds, according to Alaska Tribal Spectrum (ATS), In this age of remote work, remote doctor visits, and paperwork that must be filed solely online, not having an internet connection is crippling.

"Tribes really went dark for a time--no internet, no phones; I have a client who had to go to the top of a hill because he had no service at the tribal administration building," Jacobsson says.

But several organizations are working to provide solutions that they hope will result in affordable--and even, in some cases, completely subsidized--internet service for all Alaskans, even those living off the grid, working aboard a fishing vessel, harvesting fish at a fish camp, or at a temporary job site, miles from any community.

Bridging the Middle Mile

ATAA is partnering with ATS to bridge the "middle mile" of internet service, the section of service that runs from a core carrier to a community. In March, ATS secured a license from the Federal Communications Commission for the largest 2.5 gigahertz single-spectrum wireless system in the United States, spanning most of Southcentral and Southwest Alaska, Nome and its surrounding area, and a few communities in the Interior and Southeast.

ATS is a nonprofit representing 104 member tribes--roughly half the tribes in Alaska and a quarter of all tribes in the United States. It hopes to leverage the collective tribal voice to create a statewide Alaska Tribal Network (ATN) that will include tribally-owned, last-mile village infrastructure that can connect with existing high-speed satellite service to deliver broadband and cell service to unserved and underserved rural Alaskans. If fiber optic cable becomes available one day, the infrastructure can pivot and use that as well.

"We all want fiber--we would all love to have fiber come to our communities--but it's going to take years for every community to see some fiber. Should they continue to suffer...