About 60,000 Alaska residents have no access to broadband, while another 200,000 have limited access to low-end broadband that fails to go beyond 10Mbps download and 1Mbps upload speeds, according to Alaska Tribal Spectrum (ATS). In this age of remote work, remote doctor visits, and paperwork that must be filed solely online, not having an internet connection is crippling.

“Tribes really went dark for a time—no internet, no phones; I have a client who had to go to the top of a hill because he had no service at the tribal administration building,” Jacobsson says.

But several organizations are working to provide solutions that they hope will result in affordable—and even, in some cases, completely subsidized—internet service for all Alaskans, even those living off the grid, working aboard a fishing vessel, harvesting fish at a fish camp, or at a temporary job site, miles from any community.

ATAA is partnering with ATS to bridge the “middle mile” of internet service, the section of service that runs from a core carrier to a community. In March, ATS secured a license from the Federal Communications Commission for the largest 2.5 gigahertz single-spectrum wireless system in the United States, spanning most of Southcentral and Southwest Alaska, Nome and its surrounding area, and a few communities in the Interior and Southeast.

ATS is a nonprofit representing 104 member tribes—roughly half the tribes in Alaska and a quarter of all tribes in the United States. It hopes to leverage the collective tribal voice to create a statewide Alaska Tribal Network (ATN) that will include tribally-owned, last-mile village infrastructure that can connect with existing high-speed satellite service to deliver broadband and cell service to unserved and underserved rural Alaskans. If fiber optic cable becomes available one day, the infrastructure can pivot and use that as well.

“We all want fiber—we would all love to have fiber come to our communities—but it’s going to take years for every community to see some fiber. Should they continue to suffer or get relief now?” asks ATS General Manager Jim Berlin.

ATS partnered with OneWeb, a low-earth orbit (LEO) satellite telecom service. Berlin says ATS applied for a “massive amount” of OneWeb’s satellite capacity.

“If we apply and buy down the cost, now you’ve got a winning combination, so no matter where you are in Alaska, you can have service right now,” he says. “That’s the only way to solve this problem for much of Alaska.”

That’s where the “last mile” comes in—providing service from the community to individuals and households. Under the ATN approach, each member village would own its last-mile connection, allowing tribal entities to act as an internet service provider (ISP), or they could allow commercial ISPs to serve their residents and, because they own the network, charge the service providers for use of their hardware. They could also obtain grants to subsidize the cost of internet service to their members.

Kids hang out near the school in Akiak to access wireless internet through their phones.

Katie Basile | KYUK

The approach, Berlin says, is based on a successful model at work in Dutch Harbor. It’s run by OptimERA, a grass-roots cellular and broadband provider in Unalaska that has been growing since 2005. OptimERA helped develop ATN.

“It’s a fluid model; it’s hardened for Alaska,” Berlin says. “When the installations go in, once they’re actually there, it takes less than a week to set this up in the community—it’s like setting up an IKEA desk.”

For most villages, the entire system can be shipped in a shipping container. Inside is a 40-foot tower. Berlin says it’s pretty simple to erect: lay it out on the ground, attach it to a car battery, and hoist it. Inside the container are all the computers and switches necessary for operation. No holes need to be bored, no platform poured. The ballasted foundation can withstand wind up to 150 miles per hour, he says, and the tower has a service radius of around six to eight miles. Each containerized tower costs between $200,000 and $500,000, depending on whether cellular service is also part of the system.

Berlin says ATS hopes to serve about ninety-six villages on its member list with this model. Some villages might have terrain that requires more than one tower, or perhaps a taller tower, to provide adequate coverage. From there, end users simply need a router to have full internet access.

“It’ll also carry out to ships in the bay. But, say there’s a fish camp further afield; we have the capability to put these on vehicles. We could put it on a snowmachine and be connected via a mobile unit—or just set up another satellite downlink. You can set up a relay and propagate from there,” he says. “But for most of these villages, one tower is covering where 99 percent of the people live.”

Berlin says ATS is optimistic that the influx of federal funding will boost the network and help it begin setting up in communities soon. It has a $251 million application for funding that would do exactly that.

“We have the answer, we just need the funding,” he says.

Two satellites are soon going to be available that could feasibly allow anyone, anywhere in Alaska—with a dish receiver, modem, laptop, and electricity—to connect to the internet at upload/download speeds of 25/3Mbps, comparable with residents in urban Alaska.

The company behind the two satellites is Pacific Dataport. It was formed with investment from Anchorage-based Microcom, Maryland-based Space Partnership International, and others, according to its website.

Flat and relatively open, Akiak is a good setting for Pacific Dataport to erect a tower and test its OneWeb service.

Yupiit School District

Pacific Dataport was created in 2017 out of necessity, according to Shawn Williams, vice president of government affairs and strategy. Microcom’s leaders realized the company was running out of capacity to sell to new customers. The first satellite, a micro HTS, or high-throughput satellite, will be launched in August, along with several other satellites that other companies are launching at the same time. The unit is about the size of a dishwasher, Williams says, and will serve about 10,000 new users.

The second phase, Williams says, is a much larger satellite, dubbed a GEO VHTS, or geostationary very-high-throughput satellite, which will serve about 100,000 consumers simultaneously.

“That’s about what the FTC [Federal Trade Commission] says Alaska has for underserved or unserved rural Alaskans,” Williams says.

The second satellite is due to be launched in 2024, he says. The Aurora system, as Pacific Dataport calls the pair, would provide the first commercially available high-speed data service statewide. The company says the Aurora system would provide low-latency and highly secure communications between locations anywhere in Alaska.

“When some people hear about satellite broadband, they cringe. They think of the old C band technology that is sometimes still being used in rural Alaska,” Williams says. “What would normally be very slow, very expensive, very poor-quality satellite broadband is kind of the old way of doing things. We have the new technology that is more affordable and more reliable than what some people might be used to.”

Pacific Dataport serves as a wholesaler, selling the middle mile to tribes, tribal consortiums, and to resellers like Microcom. Individuals would likely purchase service through Microcom, which would act as the internet service provider.

OneWeb’s assembly plant in Florida. When the 648-satellite constellation is complete this year, Alaska Tribal Spectrum is lined up to use part of its worldwide broadband coverage.

OneWeb Satellites

Although the setup is slightly different from the Aurora system, Williams says Akiak is currently testing something similar. Roughly 100 businesses and households in the community had an internet provider but were unhappy with the service. Akiak used grant funding to build and maintain a last-mile system that connects them, through Pacific Dataport, to the OneWeb LEO. The service is free while it’s still in testing, Williams says. When the testing period completes, the community will be getting 75Mbps download and 15Mbps upload speeds for $150 a month. Similar service at the 25/3 Mbps rate currently costs between $299 and $499 in some rural communities.

The Central Council of the Tlingit & Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska is working to provide connectivity to residents in the Sitka area—fixed, wireless broadband service, not cell phones—with the goal that the service be subsidized as much as possible.

Tlingit & Haida applied for the right to use the 2.5 gigahertz spectrum within a specific area. “Sitka selected Sitka; we selected the area around Sitka that they did not select. We have the outskirts, anywhere that the local community did not select,” says Chris Cropley, a network architect for Tlingit & Haida.

Although Tlingit & Haida applied for the right to use the spectrum, Cropley says it will provide service to all citizens within the coverage area. “It dovetails into the Affordable Connectivity Program,” Cropley says. Qualified residents may be eligible for up to $75 per month per household, he says.

“We are really trying to take advantage of all these programs; we’re trying to provide as much internet as we can,” Cropley says. But he made it clear the tribes are not trying to horn in on other companies’ territory. “We’re only looking at building out to serve the unserved and underserved,” he says.

The Tlingit & Haida plan focuses on last-mile solutions, working with different carriers and using whatever middle-mile solution is available in each area. In Sitka, for example, fiber optic is available, Cropley says, so that’s what will be used. In Wrangell, internet service will be purchased from existing carriers. “We don’t believe in using another system where one already exists,” Cropley says.

He says Tlingit & Haida is working to develop towers that can be moved into an unserved area as well.

Some of the “unserved” residents exist within “served” communities. Within Sitka, for example, 38 households don’t currently have internet service. In Juneau, about two percent of the population is unserved, or about 227 households. “That’s bigger than a third of the villages in Southeast Alaska,” he says.

Juneau is currently considered “served,” but if Tlingit & Haida is able to obtain more money in the future, it may be able to work toward making sure those 227 households have the option to connect.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime, once-in-a-generation—the largest opportunity to bring internet to Alaska,” Cropley says. “How exciting is it that we can create remote jobs? What happens when we start bringing these professional, high-paying jobs to villages in Alaska? Even more exciting, what happens when we bring our culture’s local artwork to the rest of the world? When Shirley Kendall, instead of providing language classes at UAA, can provide them to the world? That’s part of why we’re looking at it as a holistic approach.”