On Sunday morning, many Kotzebue residents woke to find their internet down and cell phones without service. Several days later, there’s little-to-no communications in or out, and it might be two months until services are restored to normal.
That’s according to a press release from telecommunications company Quintillion. On Monday, Quintillion reported a fiber optic cable in the Arctic Ocean had been cut, essentially severing the main artery of communications for most of rural Alaska west of Prudhoe Bay.
According to the press release, ice was the culprit. The severed cable is about 30 miles from Oliktok Point in Prudhoe Bay — and 90 feet beneath the ice.
In Kotzebue, the outage is affecting the local government operations. The City of Kotzebue is experiencing a “complete outage” to all departments. And the Northwest Arctic Borough says their telephone and internet services are down.
Kelly Williams is the CEO of OTZ telephone, a Kotzebue-based communications cooperative that provides internet, phone and cellular service to the region.
“A lot of people don’t know, this fiber optic cable is made of glass — it’s a tiny little glass tube,” he said. “Impact that ice can have, which we’ve all seen when you live in our area, especially sea ice, that there’s an inherent risk there,” he said.
The cable break is primarily affecting the hub cities of Bethel, Nome, Kotzebue and Utqiagvik. Williams says many remote communities in the Northwest Arctic are unaffected by the break. Villages in the region are mostly serviced by satellite.
“All the 10 village communities we serve are still up and running fine. We have them connected through a mixture of technologies of low, Earth-orbiting satellites and geosynchronous satellites,” he said.
For OTZ customers in Kotzebue, Williams says the communications outage only knocked out broadband.
“We had a backup system in place by which all of our emergency services, calling, texting, immediately switched when that cable was severed over and kept all of our, what we would call our vital services, up and working,” he said.
Heather Handyside is the Chief Communications officer for GCI. She says you can imagine that the fiber optic cable is a highway. But the highway’s been blocked. Now, GCI customers have to take a detour — they can get back online with satellite and microwave technology.
“It’s critical, especially in places like rural Alaska with unpredictable conditions, unpredictable weather, typhoons, earthquakes, wildfires, that there are backup systems,” sh said. “We will at least be able to deliver a basic level for phone calls, emails, text messages.”
But the backup internet service is still spotty and slow. As of Tuesday afternoon, many businesses in Kotzebue were unable to process credit card payments. Some even closed. The University of Fairbanks Chukchi Campus and library remain closed until further notice following the outage.
