Seven months after a subsea fiber optic line break near Prudhoe Bay, sea ice conditions are almost safe enough for two vessels, IT Integrity and Canpac Valkyrie, to begin repairs.
Anchorage-based telecommunications company Quintillion said the January break was caused by an “ice scour” event. The underwater cable break left some customers across northern and western Alaska without high-speed internet for weeks. Quintillion helped reroute traffic to satellite internet providers following the outage.
The two ships are standing by near Wainwright on the northwestern edge of Alaska. Quintillion President Mac McHale said the ships will help restore fiber service by the end of the year.
“If we could have done it months ago, we would have, but again, you're basically, really dependent on the ice conditions in the area,” McHale said.
The January break was Quintillion’s second in as many years. McHale said the company has learned from the past, and plans to bury the cable even deeper to prevent future scours.
“We actually designed, engineered, fabricated, and tested some new chain trenching tools that we’ll utilize in the area that will go very, very deep, up to three and a half meters,” McHale said.
As the repairs begin, Quintillion is also working on two backup plans to build redundancy for the network. The first is a thousand-mile extension to the existing line, which will run from Nome to Homer. Paired with Quintillion’s existing terrestrial fiber, it will complete a “ring” around Alaska. If there is a break along the line, traffic can be sent clockwise or counterclockwise around the ring, away from the source of the outage.
The second is a new, terrestrial line between Prudhoe Bay and Utqiagvik. Such a line would traverse 200 miles of state and federal land. McHale said permitting on the above-ground cable was mostly complete, and work could begin as early as this winter.
“That's really three levels of protection that we didn't have in 2023,” McHale said.
The repair, new subsea line from Nome to Homer and terrestrial line from Prudhoe Bay to Utqiagvik will come at a cost in the hundreds of millions of dollars. McHale said Quintillion is seeking funding from the Department of Defense to fund the projects, in addition to significant investments of their own.
Questioning the cause
McHale said Quintillion felt confident in its initial assessment of break being caused by an ice shear event. He said Quintillion partnered with Sandia National Laboratories to perform synthetic aperture radar scans of the area and concluded that a pressure ridge or ice feature was the culprit.
McHale said the assessment ruled out international interference.
“We're pretty confident that it's not the Russians. It wasn't anything nefarious. It was Mother Nature again and unfortunately it created a service outage. But we're going to learn from it,” McHale said.
McHale said Mother Nature will likely keep giving Quintillion troubles, but with the two added layers of redundancy the team will be able to quickly adapt to arising problems.
"We can't guarantee it's never going to get cut again because, you know, who's stronger and smarter than Mother Nature?" McHale said. "Not us."
Quintillion expects repairs on the subsea cable to be complete this summer season. If it receives the necessary permits, Quintillion hopes to begin work on the terrestrial line between Prudhoe Bay and Utqiagvik this winter followed by the completion of the Nome to Homer Express subsea cable line in 2026.
The project would not likely go online until 2027, following testing.