Alaska Communications Systems (ACS) has begun cable-laying operations to link Anchorage with Florence, Ore., providing an eight-fold boost to the bandwidth, according to the company. The project, dubbed AKORN, short for Alaska Oregon Network (10K), is meant to meet the demand for bandwidth by large-capacity users including government, the military, banks and corporations.
The system will have an ultimate capacity to transmit 64, 10 Gigabit wavelengths on each of the 4 fiber pairs for a total potential bandwidth of nearly 2.6 Terabits. It provides significant advancements over the existing links from Alaska to the Lower 48 which have just 2 or 3 fibers, and a much lower design capacity.
Competitor GCI’s Alaska United West fiber-optic line links Seward, AK, to Warrenton, Oregon while their Southeast fiber line runs 754 miles of cable connecting Ketchikan Alaska to Seattle.
The cable ship Tyco Resolute, owned by Tyco Communications, will lay the 3,000 miles of cable between Kachemak Bay by Homer Alaska and Florence, Oregon. It will pick up the end of the cable in Kachemak Bay, then splice it to the cable stored on board. It’s a delicate and time-consuming operation done in a “clean room” inside the ship.
The ship will then begin go south across the Gulf of Alaska, buried beneath the ocean floor. A splitter in the new cable will also allow a future connection to Southeast Alaska and Juneau.
AKORN is part of a $175 million investment by ACS.
WCI’s Northstar cable, built earlier, also has a branch to Juneau, Alaska, with a design capacity of 15 Gbps (upgradeable to 200 Gbps with current generation terminal equipment), and had points of interconnection to international networks in Hillsboro and Portland.
Despite $300 million in funding from its founding in 1996, WCI Cable declared bankruptcy in 2001. Carlyle Venture Partners purchased WCI’s stock from bankruptcy in July 2002 for $47.9 million.
In April of 2008, ACS announced its intent to purchase Crest Communications, now the owner and operator of Northstar. The purchase will then give ACS control of two of the four cables currently connecting Alaska to the Lower 48.
The earlier Northstar system includes an undersea fiber system of approximately 1,900 miles with cable landing facilities in Whittier, Juneau, and Valdez, Alaska, and Nedonna Beach, Oregon, providing redundancy to their new Florence, Oregon landing site. The Northstar system also includes terrestrial fiber linking Nedonna Beach, Oregon to their Network Operations Control Center in Hillsboro, Oregon and collocation facilities in Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington.
The Oregon Coast Telecommunications Economic Development Strategy (pdf) partly relies on transpacific fiber.
In an interview with ZD Net, Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden, the NSA’s director, laughed when asked whether the NSA had tapped undersea cables. “I’m not going to sit here and dissuade you from your views,” he said. But he suggested that access isn’t the problem. Rather, he said, the sheer volume and variety of today’s communications means “there’s simply too much out there, and it’s too hard to understand.”
Veterans of the undersea fiber-optic cable business say an undersea tap would strain the limits of technology, and cable operators aren’t happy that the NSA may have pulled one off. “We don’t believe this is possible, but assuming it was, there’s no way we want someone trying to get into our cables,” says Frank Denniston, chief technical officer for London-based Flag Telecom.
By the end of 2007, 25 oceanic fiber contracts totaling 112,000 route-kilometers were awarded.
Both of Portland’s cable ships, the Tyco Durable and Global Sentinel, are expected to have plenty of work throughout the Pacific as the telecom industry rebounds. Here are Research Ship Schedules.
Related DailyWireless articles include; Ships Impounded for Cable Cutting, AT&T: More Transpacific Cable, Verizon’s TransPacific Express, Google: Now it’s Transpacific Fiber, Google + SingTel = Unity Submarine Fiber, Fifth Submarine Cable Damaged, Forth Submarine Cable Damaged, Mediterranean Submarine Cables Cut and Fiber Crosses the Pond.
