MTA announced Tuesday that it has completed building Alaska’s first fiber-optic connection to the Lower 48 that does not involve an undersea cable.
Officials for the Mat-Su Borough-based telecom co-operative say the line adds internet reliability and capacity, and it can be scaled up as Alaska’s broadband needs grow.
The new line, called AlCan One, runs nearly 300 miles from North Pole, in the Interior, to the Canadian border. From there it connects to Canadian carriers and then to hubs in the contiguous U.S.
MTA Vice President Francis LaChapelle said government agencies and the military have expressed an interest in using the new line.
“We’re also getting a lot of interest from telecommunication and content companies in the Lower 48 who are looking at this as a new route into Alaska, both for a more cost-effective as well as a scalable path that offers opportunities they don’t have right now,” he said.
MTA Chief Executive Michael Burke said the cooperative has been paying millions of dollars to lease capacity on existing cables. He says the new fiber optic line makes that expense unnecessary, so the new project won’t cost its member-customers anything extra.
Liz Ruskin is the Washington, D.C., correspondent at Alaska Public Media. Reach her at lruskin@alaskapublic.org. Read more about Liz here.
