Communications company Quintillion says it should soon be able to repair the undersea fiber optic cable that was severed near Prudhoe Bay on Jan. 18. The damaged cable left some residents in northern and western Alaska without high speed internet for several weeks.
The company says moving ice severed the cable north of Oliktok Point, in the same area as a fiber cut in the summer of 2023 that cut off cellular and internet services to northern Alaska for months.
Quintillion President Michael “Mac” McHale said a repair vessel and a support ship are standing by in Wainwright to fix the cable.
“We're anticipating ice clearing out in the next few days, but we're obviously at the mercy of wind and currents and temperature,” McHale said. “As soon as there's clear and safe passage into the area, those vessels will move in.”
McHale said the support ship, the Valkyrie, is around the length of a football field and has a 60-ton crane used to lower a remote operated vehicle to the sea floor.
“We've got more innovative tools, we've got two vessels, we've got dive teams — there's countless, countless other improvements that we've made,” McHale said.
McHale said the company needs to find the two ends of the cable, bring them to the deck of the repair ship, clean them and remove damage. Then the cables can be spliced together.
“I'm making it sound a little more simple than it actually is,” McHale said. “But once that cable is spliced, and that can happen pretty quickly, service will be back on, and service will go live.”
From there, McHale said reburying the cable could take another two weeks. This time, the company plans to use new trenching tools that can dig about 10 feet into the seabed.
The company is also working on new redundancies that McHale said should keep service going if one fiber optic line is cut. A 950-mile fiber optic line will stretch from Nome to Homer to create what McHale calls “a super ring” around Alaska, and a 200-mile terrestrial fiber will connect Utqiaġvik to Prudhoe Bay.
“Redundancy is not the first step, unless you're in a flat, simple environment like cornfields in Iowa,” McHale said. “It's easier to build a fiber optic network in an environment like that than it is in the Beaufort or Chukchi Sea.”
