As crews scrambled to repair a subsea fiber optic cable cut that left rural internet customers in the dark in the summer of 2023, the company that owns the network was also busy securing nearly $90 million from the federal government to nearly double its length.
At the time, Quintillion president Michael “Mac” McHale said that the funding for its Nome to Homer Express Route couldn’t have come sooner, and that if the lines had been in place, the outages would have been avoided completely.
Those lines aim to bring the total length of Quintillion’s network to nearly 2,500 miles and connect into existing subsea cables running from Nome to Prudhoe Bay. This would create what McHale calls a “ring around Alaska,” not prone to single points of failure.
Now, Quintillion has secured another $25 million to extend that network to the Yukon-Kuskokwim (Y-K) Delta community of Hooper Bay. McHale said that the company hopes to complete the project sometime in early 2027.
“Our plan has been all along to use that to build laterals in from that subsea network into the coastal villages. So this is kind of the first one in a series that we're working on,” McHale said.
According to the United States Department of Agriculture ReConnect Program, the grant to connect Hooper Bay will go to serve nearly 1,400 people, 19 businesses, and a charter school. Once in place, the nearby communities of Chevak and Scammon Bay will also be able to tap into speeds of at least 1 gigabit per second (Gbps), considered the gold standard for high-speed internet.
Now that funding is approved, Quintillion said that it will continue working closely with the Hooper Bay tribe and the village corporation, the Sea Lion Corporation, to see the project through.
“We'll have them at the table with us every step of the way. So it'll be a really collaborative effort,” McHale said.
Sea Lion Corporation General Manager William Naneng said that most of the community is currently relying on Starlink low-Earth orbit satellite internet that offers speeds just a fraction of what is possible with fiber. Going back to 2012, Hooper Bay had relied almost entirely on GCI’s hybrid fiber-microwave TERRA network, which Naneng said was prone to outages.
“The infrastructure that we were using then was very much affected by the weather. Sometimes these towers would get iced up. We would lose services for over a week,” Naneng said.
Naneng said that the fiber internet will be particularly useful for providing distance learning and training opportunities, including supporting the needs of the Hooper Bay Charter School, which he said has struggled with sporadic internet since opening in 2020.
“We just don't have that critical mass of population to build libraries or those museums where people go and learn different things,” Naneng said. “This infrastructure will help close that. At least we can virtually be able to go to those places.”
"A pig in a python"
Like Quintillion, GCI is also preparing to leverage massive federal grants to unspool fiber optic cables across Western Alaska through their roughly 900-mile AIRRAQ network in partnership with Bethel Native Corporation.
McHale said that once in place, Quintillion’s subsea cables could hypothetically connect into the AIRRAQ network in the lower Yukon River community of Emmonak. He said that the two companies are coordinating with each other as the networks take shape.
“We respect what they do. They respect what we do. We try to make sure we're not stepping on each other as we're propagating these networks,” McHale said.
According to Quintillion, Hooper Bay residents can expect to have access to internet speeds and rates similar to residents in Anchorage, something that AIRRAQ has also promised. The key difference is that while AIRRAQ will be operated by GCI, the Quintillion cables as of yet do not have a dedicated provider. They could ultimately be operated by any number of providers, whether it be Alaska Communications, AT&T, or even GCI.
McHale said that the deluge of funding for rural broadband under the Biden administration has laid the foundation for connecting up the state like never before.
“This has certainly been a bump or kind of a pig in a python in terms of capital coming into the industry, but that will slow at some point,” McHale said. “But once that major infrastructure is in place, then you're going to see folks innovating and further propagating these networks into even more remote areas.”
While high-speed fiber internet is at least a couple years away from being a reality for Hooper Bay, GCI said that it expects the first fiber internet connections in its AIRRAQ network to be made in the Y-K Delta hub community of Bethel sometime in 2025.
