Not Nome’s first rodeo: Dealing with the cut fiber optic cable
It’s been over a week since the Quintillion fiber optic cable was severed below the sea ice over 30 miles North of Oliktok Point. Despite the spotty service, Nome carries on, as telecommunications companies work to restore internet speeds for thousands of users.
Communities across western and northwestern Alaska woke up on Saturday, January 18 to no internet. On January 27 it was determined that the fiber cut incurred an ice scour, “there is clear evidence of fast ice and sea ice activity in the fault area,” Quintillion President Mac McHale wrote in a statement.
This is the second major fiber optic outage Nome has experienced. In June of 2023 the cable was cut in an area near the current break, repairing the cable took over three months and as businesses and homes sought alternatives, Nome saw an influx of Starlink satellite dishes.
Homes, businesses, even the City of Nome is utilizing the satellite internet service to access the internet.
Starlink seems to be the main solution for Nomeites, if people didn’t already have it, they do now. And as a new crop of satellite dishes cropped up across town, the Nugget checked in to see how government, organizations and businesses are coping.
City of Nome
The City of Nome’s operations came to a full stop in the first days following the break. They quickly purchased a Starlink and it was up and running by Thursday January 23, though still with some hiccups. Because the city’s email servers are owned by TelAlaska, Starlink doesn’t allow access under their internet, which means city communications are limited to phone calls or in- person visits. “After it’s happened over and over again, I feel like not just us as a City but businesses, too, should be lobbying against their service providers to provide something as an actual working backup,” City Clerk and Acting City Manager Dan Grimmer told the Nugget. “Because our internet shouldn’t have to be down for a week.”
City departments like the Nome Police Department, museum and library are also covered under Starlink services though “I can’t say the speeds are where we’d like them to be,” Grimmer said. Paperwork for permits need to be done in person at City Hall as city employees cannot send or receive emails.
NPD has been having phone issues in the wake of the cable break. On January 23, NPD put out a message on Facebook that the 911 number as well as their non-emergency line were having issues. The temporary number to call for dispatch is 907-304-1192. “Apparently this issue is GCI phone/internet and not related to other providers,” NPD wrote. Their email is also not working.
Nome Joint Utility is also having problems with their payment service. The online portal for utility billing is not available and users aren’t able to pay with credit or with debit cards. To make a payment on a utility account, cash and checks are accepted at the NJUS Customer Service Office, located in the BSNC office building open noon to 4:30 p.m.
Move to Starlink
Other businesses around town are faring better, having purchased Starlink accounts during the 2023 outage and never switching back over. “We really didn’t see any issues because we were already running off Starlink,” Manager of Alaska Commercial Company in Nome Vickey McDonald said.
The Alaska Court System office has a Starlink, too, and they’ve only noticed emails get sent back when the person on the receiving end is having internet problems.
Northrim Bank joins the ranks of Starlink users and Branch Manager Drew McCann couldn’t be happier they made the switch. Just before their opening in July of 2023, the first cable break occurred. McCann said he put his foot down with higher ups, “I wouldn’t open without Starlink.”
They got the satellite service, and the branch was in business. A year and a half later when the cable broke again, they switched from their internet provider seamlessly to their backup Starlink and everything has been running smoothly since.
Sitnasuak Native Corporation and their subsidiary Bonanza Fuel are in the Starlink club, too.
During the last outage they bought Starlink to have something that worked right away, Sitnasuak Vice President of Human Resources Heather Spear-Morris told the Nugget. Once the cable was repaired, Sitnasuak returned to using GCI’s services, keeping Starlink as a backup.
“Over the past couple of months we’ve actually been exploring moving completely over to Starlink,” Spear-Morris said. “So once we had the fiber break [in 2025] we already had our Express store using Starlink.”
Starlink was once plan B but is now plan A. Spear-Morris said with fuel drivers out in the field they need to be protected and able to communicate, so now the corporation is also looking into using Starlink minis for internet access on the go.
CEO of Bonanza Scot Henderson said the initial break brought the card machines down at the gas station, which meant people had no access to fuel during the hours they were rebooting the Starlink system. “When your customers can’t get gas in Nome, that’s not a good thing,” Henderson said.
Making do without satellite dish
Local restaurants are deviating from the Starlink trend. Milano’s has maintained business using their GCI internet, which is slow but still allows for transactions on the card reader. Sometimes calls will drop when people place orders, but customers still come in, the Kangs said.
Over at Airport Pizza, they’re experiencing something similar: phone calls tend to drop, but customers haven’t stopped coming in. And while they have a Starlink leftover from the last outage, they won’t put it up unless they have to, Dae An told the Nugget.
“This year it’s fine. To put it [Starlink dish] up I have to climb up the connex so I don’t know if I want to do that or not,” An laughed.
Kawerak reported no impact whatsoever to their operations following the break. In 2021 they put a system in place that utilizes multiple internet connections from different providers, it’s a system called Software Defined WAN.
“Essentially it is a “virtual” internet connection that runs over several physical internet connections, ideally from a variety of providers so you have route diversity. With our current setup we can take up to four simultaneous physical internet connections and blend them into the one SD-WAN or ‘virtual’ connection,” Kawerak’s IT Director Elgin Dean wrote to the Nugget.
What are the telecommunications companies doing?
In the days following the break, companies providing internet services that utilized the fiber optic cable, GCI and Fastwyre/ TelAlaska in Nome, scrambled to get users on their backup systems and restore their capabilities.
Users observed in the initial days that calls were dropping, webpages loaded slowly and general dysfunction occurred when it came to internet usage. Then slowly, speeds were restored.
In the first week GCI technicians worked to remotely reroute users onto different backup systems including the microwave tower system TERRA and low Earth orbit, or LEO, and Geostationary orbit, or GEO, satellites. This improved the quality of internet services, including wireless and cable modems, GCI Director of Corporate Communications Megan Webb wrote to the Nugget.
GCI customers impacted by the outage will receive credits automatically applied to their account.
Shawn Williams is the Vice President of Government Affairs at Pacific Dataport in Anchorage, which provides wholesale connectivity through different satellite solutions, including Starlink and OneWeb.
Williams said Starlink is a really good option for rural communities impacted by the outage, as long as it’s not sold out in the area. Starlink satellites have limitations for the number of users in one area. According to the map on Starlink’s website, Nome has not reached capacity, but other areas like Bethel, Homer, Kenai and parts of Fairbanks have.
The majority of Starlink’s satellites are located closer to the equatorial band of the Earth, where there is a larger population of people. In the “polar orbit” there are less satellites.
If an area “sells out” the capacity can be increased, but it would require more satellites being sent up into low Earth orbit, Williams said.
“It's pretty well known that we could use more satellites here in the polar orbit when it comes to Starlink, and that would help alleviate those sold-out areas, too. But at the moment, I don't know of any launches,” Williams said.
But while looking to solutions in the aftermath is good, Williams wonders why telecommunications companies weren’t more prepared for another break.
“In all reality, a lot of this disruption can be avoided if they had a switch ready backup,” Williams said. “The telecoms aren’t doing it, for lack of a better explanation they’re just choosing not to have things in place.”
There is no requirement for telecommunications companies in Alaska to have a backup system in place, Williams said.
Thomas Lochner, Director of Broadband in the Alaska broadband office, confirmed there is no regulatory responsibility for redundancy.
“My role is to ensure that the unserved locations in Alaska, not the currently served locations, but the unserved locations, are able to take full advantage of the broadband equity access and deployment funding, so that there is build outs to those unserved locations,” Lochner told the Nugget.
Lochner said it would fall under the purview of the Regulatory Commission of Alaska, which did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.
Cable break update
Quintillion President Mac McHale told the Nugget they were not expecting a cable break to “ever happen again.” Following the repair in 2023 the telecommunications company monitored sea ice movement frequently, especially in breakup season.
“The world is changing, the climate is changing and the ice interaction on the North Slope is changing in a big way, so we just got to adapt to that,” McHale said.
Quintillion has immediate, near term and long-term plans going forward with this break, which isn’t expected to be repaired until late August, early September, McHale said.
Immediately, Quintillion is trying to source additional capacity to provide to internet distributors, like GCI and Fastwyre/TelAlaska. This is still in the early stages but will be a hybrid solution, blending satellite and fiberoptic cable. McHale said, he can’t speak too much on it now.
The near-term solution would be building a terrestrial fiber optic line that connects Utqiagvik to Dead Horse, plugging into various power sources along the way. The line would be spliced at the point it goes offshore and into the Beaufort Sea where the break occurred, reconnecting the fiber loop and restoring services.
There are a few hurdles before this solution could take place. Quintillion already has the cable, but they need funding to make the project happen, and for that, they’re looking to the federal government.
“There’s a lot of red tape we have to push through with BLM and FEMA,” McHale said.
In 2023 Quintillion received over $88.8 million from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration Middle Mile Broadband Infrastructure Grant Program to build a redundancy loop into Alaska’s fiber optic network. Dubbed the Nome to Homer project, in the event of another cable break, the internet could be rerouted and there would be no outage. Construction on this project is set to begin in 2027.
In the long term, Quintillion is looking at the possibility of redesigning and rerouting the current cable formation, because “the world is changing, the climate is changing,” McHale said.