Recently, The Arctic Sounder's staff was relying more than ever on modern technology to get the paper out. The only difference was our staff was more spread out than normal.
Carey Restino, the Arctic Sounder editor, had spent several days in Kotzebue, which allowed her to go snowmachining out in a storm, attend school functions and Christmas bazaars, and taste some traditional Eskimo food like whale, seal and caribou. Meantime, our reporter Hannah Heimbuch was in Hawaii traveling with family, but still reporting on news in the Arctic.
At 11 p.m. on deadline day, the paper gets laid out electronically on a MacBook that one week can be in Anchorage, next in Homer, and the next week in Kotzebue. It all works, but each photo and story being e-mailed or uploaded to the server is taking much longer than normal.
This shows how rural Alaska needs high-speed broadband more than ever. Our citizens and businesses rely on broadband Internet to work.
Internet throughout rural Alaska is all provided by satellite with slow and limited download and upload speeds. Not only is the Internet slow, but it's expensive for commercial providers to buy the bandwidth needed. It is also limited.
This satellite-only service will change for part of rural Alaska when 65 communities throughout western Alaska are connected through GCI's TERRA network shortly after the New Year. TERRA stands for "Terrestrial for Every Region of Rural Alaska" and is made up of 470-plus miles of microwave towers as high as 250 feet and fiber optic cable under water and buried on the tundra, which will connect these communities.
Much of this project is funded by federal dollars mainly coming from the 2009 American Recovery and Investment Act where GCI was awarded $44 million in loans and $44 million in grants for a total of $88 million.
Once activated, this terrestrial network will provide Internet speeds equal to those in urban Alaska, connecting 9,000 rural Alaska households and nearly 750 businesses.
But none of these communities are in the Northwest Arctic or the North Slope. Worse yet, there is no clear way to fund high speed broadband to connect our regions. We are essentially left out. High speed broadband is not just for YouTube and Facebook. It carries voice, data and video. The uses are endless, just as we depend on it to develop our community newspapers.
But beyond our own needs, the world in which we live is increasingly operating on the assumption that everyone in it has access to high Internet speeds. Documents are larger, and video is used more often, not just for recreational purposes, but for essential services like job applications to state and federal agencies, tax forms, and even health records.
Modes of communication such as Skype are virtually impossible using these connections, but are more and more commonly used. Even worse, constant outages limit essential access to audio feeds for public hearings and other government processes. Distance delivery education is limited as well by these slow connections, limiting future generations, too.
Perhaps the lawmakers who are charged with making the decisions about appropriating money toward bridging the digital divide should come to Kotzebue or Barrow for a day and try to do business there with their laptops. I guarantee the first time someone sends them a large document, their productivity will slow to a halt while they wait and wait and wait.
It's true that the Northwest Arctic is remote and proves a challenge for those trying to figuring out a way to speed things up, but it is essential and requires the attention and creative thinking of our elected officials and law-makers to find a solution to that challenge. Otherwise, current and future generations will fall behind.
Jason Evans is the owner and publisher of The Arctic Sounder, where the preceding commentary first appeared. It is republished here with permission.
The views expressed here are the writer's own and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch. Alaska Dispatch welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, e-mail commentary(at)alaskadispatch.com.