When will we get wired?

• Author: Carroll, Ed
• Position: Alaska's telecommunication systems

Advanced telecommunications may offer rural Alaskans vastly improved connections with the outside world. But without these new technologies, rural communities may become even more isolated.

Consider the days before the fax machine, when the documents of our lives traveled back and forth in stamped envelopes or were hand-carried around city centers by couriers. Important information like invoices, checks or contracts could spend days in transit in each direction - that was the pace nearly everyone planned for and expected.

Enter the fax machine, and a revolution in conducting business throughout the private sector and government. The fax brought the first widespread business use of data transmission technology - conveying information other than conversations across telephone lines - and changed our expectations about the pace of business. It's nearly as hard to do business today without a fax machine as it would be without a phone, and it's getting harder to keep up without putting the full power of personal and business computers online.

So think back before the fax, and then consider that much of Alaska is still beyond their reach. And it's not just tiny, isolated villages that still move information at the speed of a mail plane. Many of Alaska's larger regional centers, from Prince William Sound to Bristol Bay and from Southeast to the Seward Peninsula, don't have reliable fax capability.

Greg Jones, the director of GCI's eight-month-old rural services department, has seen some of the difficulties that come with poor communications as he travels in territories new to the company. "We happened to walk into the borough clerk's office in the Lake and Peninsula Borough one day earlier this winter, and found her just very frustrated because she had been trying to send a fax to one of the communities within the borough for three days, and had been unsuccessful in sending a single sheet of paper. And that demonstrates how far behind they are - particularly behind urban Alaska."

Satellite double-hopping - the two trips to space many rural calls take that account for the disconcerting delay and echo of a phone conversation - makes communication between machines random and difficult. Most Alaska communities served by satellite also cannot use computer modems reliably because of double-hops and line noise, which reduce transmission speeds to 9600 baud and often spontaneously disconnect.

How will the residents of rural Alaska keep up with the rest of the country, as the impacts of a technological revolution and an information age transform how we learn and how we do business? They are at risk of getting stuck on the other side of a widening technology gap, relegated to an information-poor underclass, without access to markets and the educational opportunities of high-tech offerings, including the Internet and video teleconferencing.

"We need to be a part of that system very much," says Jim Rowe, executive director of the Alaska Telephone Association, the industry group representing local exchange companies (LECs) around the state. "If we're left off, we really become Third World."

Steve Conn, executive director of the Alaska Public Interest Research Group (AkPIRG), agrees, saying, "I think this is the most important issue in Alaska today." Conn, who participated in the Alaska 2001 Committee, a statewide telecom policy issues group formed by the Alaska Public Utilities Commission, sees too little citizen input and worries that the influence of industry interests may sway policy-makers.

Equal access to telecommunications technology is the basis for economic and political participation, Conn says, and he advocates an amendment to the Alaska Constitution mandating universal service, if necessary. "The very future of these communities is at stake," Conn says. "We see this as the equivalent of establishing the Postal Service back in Ben Franklin's day."

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