The Last Frontier goes global.

• Author: Colby, Kent L.
• Position: Technology - Telecommunications industry

It has been a long time since Alaska first communicated via telegraph, an electronic apparatus used to send messages by code over wires to the Lower 48 and the rest of the world. The technology making those first cryptic messages possible simultaneously changed and shrunk the world. Though the communications were unidirectional and limited only by the sending operator's key-stroke capability and the receiver's trained ear, it was a beginning.

But it began the Last Frontier's path to becoming a leader in communications and associated technology.

Consider the brief history of communications in Alaska. Because of the growth in dial-up service and customers' demand, high-speed satellite links and microwave hops to the Lower 48 ran at maximum during the 1970s and 1980s. It was in 1991 when the North Pacific Cable (NPC) brought the first fiber-optic cable to the state. That connection offered new life to the telecommunications industry and introduced the concept of broadband to Alaskans. Not long afterward, that single spur off the trunk stretching from Oregon to Japan became overloaded. For example, in the case of a glitch in the oceanic fiber line, all traffic was routed back to the satellites' limited capacity, slowing information to a crawl and preempting services like the old RATS network.

The industry saw major development in late 1999, when two additional fiber-optic cables were strung along the Pacific Ocean floor, connecting Oregon and Washington states to Alaska. Australian money financed one and Alaskan company GCI the other. Both cables include a spur to Juneau and both feature a capacity far exceeding that of the first umbilical communications to the state. Plus, the two new cables can be upgraded where the previous lines could not.

GCI continued its fiber route inland from Valdez to Fairbanks and Prudhoe Bay. The additional bandwidth across the state's heartland freed up satellite space that has since been allocated to rural Alaska. Now virtually every community and village in the state has an earth-station linking it through satellite to the rest of the world.

BROADBAND DEFINED

Broadband: the word itself is rather broad in definition. The Federal Communications Commission has dedicated an entire Web site to the subject at www.fcc.gov/cgb/broadband. And FCC Chairman Michael Powell, in a speech to the National Summit on Broadband Deployment in Washington, D.C., posed that broadband has become the central communications policy...