Technology puts ATU in competitive arena.

• Author: Ess, Charlie
• Position: Anchorage Transparent Utility - Includes related article on ATU's purchase of a one-third share of Alaskan Choice Television

Anchorage's city-owned telephone utility invents a way to compete nationally in a market that grows more cutthroat by the hour.

Atlas. Wasn't he the Greek god who led Cronus into battle against Zeus, but was defeated and assigned the punishment of holding up the earth on his back? Well, he's been reduced to an acronym.

Though the 1990s have a way of turning Greeks into geeks when melding mythology with technology, this new acronymic force, Anchorage Transparent LAN Access Service (ATLAS) might best be remembered for its strength in holding the Anchorage Telephone Utility up with its competitors as telecommunications heads into the next millennium.

Further defined, ATLAS is ATU's newest data service, capable of sending 1.5 million bits of information through a 75-mile fiber-optic loop around Anchorage. Users can link directly into the system via fiber-optic cable leads or tie into the continuous circuit through ATLAS Lite, which is a blend of switching facilities that uses existing copper-wire lines and fiber-optic cable. Depending on the condition of the copper wire, ATLAS Lite subscribers can send data at speeds ranging from 384,000 to 1.5 million bits per second.

Those claims sounded too good to pass up for The Anchorage School District and the National Weather Service. To appreciate the speed and the volume requirements of the weather service, consider that each weather map emblazoned across your TV screen starts out as a file containing 5 million bytes. The weather service processes about 1.2 billion bytes of satellite data every day from their earth station near the Anchorage International Airport. Three million bytes come in every six minutes from their Doppler radar in Kenai, and a supercomputer in Washington, D.C. pipes in files measuring 30 million bytes each.

The applications don't stop there. With 37 locations in the state, about half of them in Anchorage, Carr Gottstein Foods was another customer to jump into the new system. The Carrs administrative building was hooked up directly to the fiber-optic ring, with each of the stores tied in via ATLAS Lite. The stores report to administrative headquarters each day; the product orders are shipped each night; and every store has access to every check, debit card or credit card transaction throughout the town but no longer experiences the problematic overloading it had with its former point-to-point systems.

Locally Invented

ATU credits Michael Carpenter, a marketing applications engineer, with the landmark idea of merging the old and new technologies. About a year ago, it struck him that by modifying the already-existing technologies at a minimal cost, the new service would be affordable for customers requiring huge amounts of data transfer. Since then, the system has earned praises from Telephony Magazine, Network World and the Orange County...