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Over land and under the sea, two long-distance communications networks are in progress this summer that will lighten the load on Southeast Alaska's maxed-out bandwidth.

Anchorage-based General Communication Inc. is laying cable in Southeast waters now. Ketchikan, Wrangell, Petersburg, Angoon and Sitka - now only served by slower satellite and microwave networks - will be tied into Juneau and to the cable that links Seward and Oregon. The network is on schedule to go online by November.

Meanwhile, Port Townsend, Wash.-owned Alaska Power & Telephone Co. is working on its own network of microwave radio towers from Skagway to Metlakatla, at the south end of Southeast.

If current trends continue, prices for local access probably won't go down - after all, telecom companies have to pay off that expensive infrastructure - but users will get more bandwidth for their money.

And more networks mean more reliable phone and Internet connections for Southeast.

That's essential for communities so far from the lower 48 states, said Marshal Kendziorek, information technology director for the Alaska Permanent Fund Corp.

"It's this connectivity to the outside world that allows us to do our work and be as effective as people who are sitting there on Wall Street," he said.

A long history of laying cable

Alaska's entry into telecoms began in the mid-1800s. Westinghouse raced Cyrus Field to get a telegraph cable to England. Westinghouse chose a route through Alaska and across Russia.

In 1910, a cable was laid from Valdez to the lower 48 states.

But the state took a long time to get to fiber optic cables, which send huge amounts of data quickly, as pulses of light through thin glass or plastic filaments.

Pacific Telecom laid the first fiber optic cable in Alaska waters in the early 1990s. But those early cables are largely broken and lying defunct underwater because technology has improved so much.

In modern cables, each line of information travels as a separate wavelength of light, a different color. That makes it easier to add capacity. Instead of laying more cable, the company just adds another color of light.

Getting a reliable connection

The subsea cable is the kind of improvement that residential and small-business customers in Juneau might never notice directly. These networks aren't the kind that head straight to people's houses.

But it's the backbone of the Internet, the wholesale bandwidth that connects communities on a larger scale. And it's a lot of bandwidth.

The subsea cable going in can carry 10 billion gigabits per second, or "roughly equal to half the total demand that Alaska has today. Anchorage, Fairbanks, the supercomputer, everything," said David Morris, spokesman for GCI. "For your area, it's a huge amount of capacity that's going in."

Juneau already has a fiber optic connection to the lower 48 states. The new cable going in will create a self-healing ring that will make connecting from Juneau, as well as the other communities, much more reliable.

That's because if the fiber breaks, for example, on the direct link from Ketchikan to Wrangell, data will be rerouted to travel all the way up to Anchorage, down to Seattle and then back to Wrangell.

"It travels at the speed of light, so you'll never know the difference," Morris said.

To some extent, it helps all the major telecom companies when one builds infrastructure. Any addition to bandwidth for one company reduces the demand on the whole system.

But telecom companies, while fiercely competitive, are still bound to work together because these networks are so incredibly expensive to put in.

"We would all like to have exclusive service everywhere, but that's not a reality," said Chris Brown, chief operating officer for AT&T Alascom. "So by cooperating, we stay competitive."

In a pinch, when a network goes down, a company relies on agreements with its competitor to share bandwidth.

The new cable will cost GCI $33 million. GCI owns two of the three fiber optic cables that link Alaska and the lower 48 states.

Laying the cable

It's a tricky business to lay undersea cable.

This summer, the crew of the Intrepid, a boat owned by Canadian-based International Telecom, has been laying cable for GCI.

The boat works in up to gale-force weather, but beyond that its crew may have to cut the cable and hold tight.

"Weather can cause havoc to the best-made cable laying plans," wrote Greg Wilt, cable engineer on the Intrepid, in a satellite e-mail dispatch Friday.

The fiber optic cable between Seward and Oregon, known as the AUFS-West cable, was built with a stub on it to branch a cable out to Southeast Alaska.

, the crew of the Intrepid found the stub. They lowered a chain covered in hooks and fished out the ground rope attached to the stub.

"Seemingly, not an easy task, seeing that it was almost 2 miles deep in the ocean - kind of the equivalent of finding a needle in a haystack," Wilt wrote.

It's so deep that it takes more than three hours just to drop the chain, and twice that to bring it back up, he said.

The crew fuses the hair-like strands of glass to splice the ends, and bundles everything into a fiber tray before enclosing it all in a special housing designed to be watertight and withstand high pressure. With luck, the cable will sit on the soft mud sea floor, connecting communities for the next quarter-century or so.

During that time, GCI will spend about $2.7 million a year just keeping a cable repair ship on call in Oregon, in case the cable breaks.

"When these things break, you don't just go to the yellow pages and look up a fiber repair ship," Morris said.

Microwave network connects rural communities

Alaska Power & Telephone spokesman Tom Ervin said it was a no-brainer for the company to build its own long-haul microwave network. AP&T began building it in 2007 and will finish next year.

AP&T provides communications for many of Southeast's towns. It has isolated sites, mostly on microwave radio, and a fiber optic cable system that connects towns on Prince of Wales Island.

But AT&T Alascom has had the only long-distance telecommunications network in Southeast for the last 30 years.

The Southeast network is "pretty near capacity," AT&T Alascom's Brown said.

Ervin called the network "extremely congested." Plus AT&T charges AP&T a lot for its bandwidth, according to Ervin.

"It was just a matter of economics for us to bring this in-house," he said.

Residential and business customers will see better cell phone coverage and more bandwidth. Long-distance phone services may eventually become cheaper, since AP&T won't be paying AT&T so much.

Microwave networks, which transmit data via microwave radio through the air, are much slower than fiber optics. And they're vulnerable to weather. They're often used as a backup telecom system in areas with extensive fiber optic networks.

But AP&T's system throughout Southeast will cost $10 million, a fraction of the cost of major fiber networks.

Telecom service carriers who buy the wholesale bandwidth will see better wireless coverage, lower costs for circuit transport and more reliability from the redundant routes, according to AP&T.

For some rural communities, the new network is crucial.

"Before, people in town couldn't afford to have the Internet. And it was cutting out all the time," said Paula Peterson, a Kasaan resident. "Now we can, in our homes."

Kasaan's network came online last year.

Now, Peterson orders school clothes for her kids online. Her kids do their schoolwork online. Her husband takes tests for his state ferry job online. They instant-message their relatives on the East Coast and elsewhere.

"It has opened us up to the world," she said.

• Contact reporter Kate Golden at 523-2276 or kate.golden@juneauempire.com.