Internet across Alaska: bridging the digital divide.

• Author: Hollander, Zaz
• Position: TELECOM & TECHNOLOGY

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Forget texting, Twitter and Facebook. Sheryle Charlie doesnt even have a computer at home.

"I can't afford it," says Charlie, tribal administrator for the Village of Minto, a 100-household community 130 miles northwest of Fairbanks. "I'm the only one working in my home of four people. My husband is disabled ... I don't even have a telephone at my house."

It can cost about $325 just to set up a satellite Internet account in Minto through GCI: $24.99 for the most basic account at 56 kilobits per second--a speed considered obsolete by some--and another $299.99 for modem and antenna.

Compare that to Palmer, where a much faster fiber optic connection through GCI starts at $29.99 for a basic cable modem plan at 10 megabits, or 10,000 kilobits, per second.

Of the 258,000 households in Alaska, 93 percent or about 240,700 have access to broadband service of at least 768 kilobits per second download speed, according to Connect Alaska--but many rural residents access the Internet through unwieldy and slow satellite connections.

Slight delays in signal transit time make Internet games and stock trades risky at best. Loading software is fraught with service drop-outs. Limited capacity makes online movie watching ridiculous: Best to start downloading in the morning so it's ready to watch by evening--talk about a digital divide.

In Alaska, the divide boils down to geography and demography. There are hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles between Bush Alaska and the fiber optic networks that provide fast broadband service to road-system residents in Juneau, Fairbanks, or Anchorage. But the small populations of many remote villages are too small to justify the cost to telecom providers of installing expensive broadband systems.

"It's a divide between developed and undeveloped markets," said Bill Popp, president and CEO of the Anchorage Economic Development Corp., who serves as chairman of the Alaska Broadband Task Force. "It's an infrastructure and a marketplace issue."

Left Behind

In 1970, Alaska's telecommunications scene in villages outside regional hubs like Bethel or Nome didn't extend much beyond short wave radio. Even short wave was sketchy. Transmissions would conk out when the Aurora Borealis was active.

By the early 1980s, largely through the efforts of the state and RCA Alaska Communications, most villages had phone service, TVs with at least a few channels and radio broadcast service, according to Dr. Alex Hills, a Palmer resident and consultant credited with building the first Wi-Fi network with a team at Carnegie Mellon...