Satellite internet has disrupted the market in Alaska — and transformed everyday life for many

A college degree, a grandson’s expression over FaceTime, immediate world news, the ease of e-filing taxes, and a how-to video for four-wheeler hub removal: That’s what Starlink, a satellite internet service that delivers cheaper and faster internet to places harder to reach with physical infrastructure, has brought to some of the last connected people in Alaska.

Starlink, a company owned by SpaceX, began sending thousands of low-orbit satellites into space in 2019, shifting the market for internet users and providers globally. Since late 2022, when it launched in Alaska, Starlink has given people another option in a previously untouchable market and with it, changed the lives of Alaskans whose internet was expensive, glitchy and limited — when it was available at all.

Early adopters of the technology say they used to drive around their villages looking for other homes with Starlink’s tell-tale flat white antennas, or terminals, positioned on roofs or lawns. These days, in some communities, it’s become more challenging to find homes without it.

“It’s not even the talk of the town anymore,” said Chevak resident Earl Atchak, who was one of the first in his roughly thousand-person Western Alaska village to switch to Starlink from the state’s largest internet provider, GCI, in November 2022. “There’s just a few people that don’t have them.”

Atchak said that Starlink, which charges users $90 a month after initial equipment fees, more than halved his internet bill for a service that’s far quicker and more reliable. He uses the internet to keep up with the news, watch movies, map fishing routes, order mechanical parts on eBay, and video call with his 36 grandchildren.

“Talking on the phone is not enough nowadays,” Atchak said of his daily FaceTime calls with his kids and grandkids, who live in other parts of the state. “We have to see how they’re doing, and the dirt on their faces from playing out. Those are special moments.”

Additionally, he said that quicker internet speeds have assisted in local search and rescue operations on his village crew. The majority of local Starlink users are mostly getting speeds over 100 megabits per second, the company says, about four times faster than what rural telecom providers are offering in the same locations.

Last winter, two girls from Scammon Bay went missing during a blizzard while traveling by snowmachine to a basketball tournament in Chevak, Atchak said. Using fast internet and millennial knowledge, Atchak’s search and rescue team downloaded Snapchat, a photo-sharing application where the girls were sharing their live locations with friends. Using the app and real-time download speeds, the search and rescue crew was able to locate the girls. Without fast download speeds, that never would have been possible, Atchak said.

‘Restoring competition’ to rural Alaska

Starlink is doing what no other provider has been able to do since the internet first arrived in Alaska — disrupt the market from what one expert called a “David and Goliath scenario: everyday people against the billion-dollar telecoms.”

When it comes to serving residents, Alaska’s telecommunication companies have dominated rural communities for too long, Pacific Dataport economist and rural broadband expert Shawn Williams said. Currently, the state’s 32 telecommunication companies receive annual federal subsidies — last year to the tune of $525 million — to provide internet service to schools, clinics, hospitals, and residents in rural Alaska. Other internet service providers, including tribal broadband consortiums, Microcom and Starlink, are cut out of accessing about a third of that funding because the Federal Communications Commission’s definition of an “eligible telecommunications carrier” excludes companies that don’t provide voice services.

The enormous payouts effectively shut out competitors in rural Alaska for all but one. The richest man in the world, Starlink founder Elon Musk, built up his company out-of-pocket, without a need for government-backed funding. Starlink only became profitable last year, according to analysis report estimates. The company’s financial reports, including usership data, are not publicly available, and Starlink did not respond to Anchorage Daily News’ request for comment.

“Restoring competition to rural Alaska is essential,” Williams said. “This is space-based broadband coming in and filling the gaps broken fiber promises (have left behind).”

Pacific Dataport, along with stakeholder groups such as the Alaska Broadband Advocates — a coalition of 13 tribal advocates — are asking for broader access to government subsidies.

In May, Williams, who serves as the vice president of government affairs and strategy for Pacific Dataport, traveled with other stakeholders to Washington, D.C., to advocate to the FCC for a competitive process for access to all government broadband subsidies.

“Then you’d have real competition,” Williams said. “That’s the only way to get prices to go down.”

Under the Biden administration, Alaska and certain in-state providers have received close to $2 billion in federal dollars to support rural broadband development.

But while the Alaska Broadband Office works to distribute the most recent $1 billion, a process the office estimates will take another five years to see the results of, Starlink is growing its customer base.

Online, a community of more than 15,000 Alaskans has formed the Alaska Starlink Users Facebook group. There, they ask questions and share tips. Teachers ask if they are able to travel to the village with their terminals, fishermen wonder how to mount terminals onto their boat’s hull, and regional folks ask others about connection lapses. Users also rely on their fellow Alaskans to fill the role of a customer support tech, a role Starlink lacks in real time. Through their troubleshooting questions and comparison of product speeds and prices, Starlink users are also delivering a clear message to flagship telecoms like GCI: Do better.

And GCI says they’re listening.

GCI’s senior vice president of corporate development, Billy Wailand, said that his company saw the competition from a distance with the creation of low-orbit satellites, and launched an initiative to better serve rural residents in response.

As part of that initiative, GCI is in the midst of two long-term projects it says will deliver underground fiber optic cables to 27 underserved communities: one that will lay more than 800 miles of subsea fiber from Kodiak to Unalaska, and another that will connect 13 communities in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. In both instances, the company is promising urban internet speeds for urban prices, said Wailand.

“All of those projects take time,” Wailand said. “So, in the meantime, Starlink has come in and offered a really good option as folks wait for terrestrial connectivity. Once we deliver fiber service, we think we will be able to deliver a very compelling internet service in those communities.”

On the North Slope, some residents switched over to Starlink from GCI last year when a subsea fiber line was cut by an iceberg, leaving thousands of Alaskans disconnected for three months.

“I think that was a turning point,” Utqiagvik resident Jake Calderwood said of the fiber outage last year. “It was when I started noticing a huge shift in the number of houses with dishes on them.” He estimates that several hundred homes, and even local businesses, switched to space-based broadband.

Life disruptor: ‘It’s put us in modern times’

It’s not only the market that Starlink is disrupting, but the thousands of lives that rely upon fast and affordable internet to carry out everyday tasks, from applying for Permanent Fund dividends to operating a business.

Photographer and digital content creator Eben Hopson of Utqiagvik — who switched to Starlink during the fiber outage last year— said that with Starlink, he’s able to produce and sell more content because he doesn’t have to wait for slow upload and download speeds.

“It helped me reach out to clients in the Lower 48 who were looking to buy Arctic content,” he said. “Instead of waiting a whole eight-hour day for a few 45-second clips to upload to Google Drive, it took under 15 minutes.”

In the village of Kasaan on Prince of Wales Island in Southeast, tribal president Mike Jones said that Starlink is connecting folks with language classes, and also virtual trainings aimed at economic development.

They’re not alone. Since late 2021, Nome’s Alaska Native corporation, Kawerak, has been using federal grant money to support students of all ages in the Bering Strait region. The project pays for laptops, internet and other necessary equipment for middle school, high school, college and adult learners age 50 and above to pursue educational goals without leaving their communities. In the nearly three years since launching, the program has supported more than 600 Alaska Native and Native American participants in the region, program director Pamela Cushman confirmed.

Carla Rose Ivanoff from Elim was one of them. At 55 years old, she connected to the internet for the first time from her home, via Starlink.

Five years ago, her 350-person village on the Norton Sound coast had one computer where residents could wait in line, sign up, and log on for a regulated 20 minutes at the tribal office. Now, for the first time, Ivanoff has unrestricted access to the whole world at her fingertips.

“I’m learning a lot from this thing right here,” Ivanoff said, gesturing to her cellphone. “This is the most exciting thing that I’ve ever done for myself.”

She’s taken online classes to learn Microsoft Excel and mathematics in the hopes of opening a bed and breakfast in town.

In addition to pursuing economic goals, Ivanoff said she’s having fun using a search engine to learn whatever she wants to know.

Among her Google searches: how to take off her four-wheeler hub, taper a stitch on her new sewing machine, identify edible mushrooms, and build a smokehouse from refuse pallets.

“Our generation, we were playing out. We didn’t have computers, phones and all that,” Ivanoff said. “I feel like I missed out. Now, I’m ready.”

It’s not just life-saving techniques and the pursuit of higher education that Alaskans have cited as results of better connectivity, but also modern conveniences that many might take for granted — like paying taxes online, and talking on the phone.

Bonni Burnell has a homestead in the Alaska Range 90 miles from the nearest road. Prior to using Starlink, she and her family had to travel more than 100 miles to Fairbanks to file taxes and apply for their Permanent Fund dividends in person.

The ability to e-file taxes has had an immensely positive impact, Burnell said.

“It’s saved us money, time, worry — everything.”

Additionally, she uses Wi-Fi calling to speak with family — a previously impossible task — and to stay connected with national news.

Compared to Sept. 11, 2001, when news of that day’s terrorist attack came to her after the fact, Burnell has been able to stay informed in real time on national headlines.

She learned of the recent assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, and of President Joe Biden dropping out of the presidential race, the same day as the rest of Americans.

“It’s put us into modern times,” Burnell said of Starlink’s connectivity. “It’s just life changing.”

Modern times, modern responsibilities

Although user feedback on Starlink seems to be overwhelmingly positive, some worry that fast and immediate connection to the internet is distracting youth from cultural traditions.

Out at his family’s fish camp, Atchak said his teenage sons get homesick during hunting and fishing trips for their internet back home.

“Twelve months out of the year, we have fast internet, and they’re on it all the time,” he said. “It becomes addictive. They’d rather be doing that than going out fishing.”

Chevak School Principal Lillian Olson said that Starlink’s rise reminds her of the time when the television was the new hot thing. Similarly to how TV catapulted her village into the 21st century, she said that Starlink is the best decision she ever made for her household.

“But that doesn’t excuse us from watching what young kids are getting into,” she said. “It used to be the TV, but now it’s the internet.”

As the night sky lights up with an increasing number of Starlink satellites, currently numbering just over 6,000 globally, Alaskans living in previously unconnected or underserved parts of the state are grateful to be in the loop, despite the modern costs.

“Even adults, we’re not excluded,” Atchak said. “We can’t live without it now.”