At 11 a.m. on Aug. 29, Sitkans found themselves without internet, cell service or texting and unable to use credit cards. Even some landlines – depending on the type of phone – didn’t work.
We didn’t see stories about the social and psychological impact of the outage in 2016; business leaders didn’t put out a survey on its economic impact.
“It’s a consequence of the fact that everything is sort of reliant on the internet these days,” said Joe Kane, director of Broadband and Spectrum Policy for the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. “Your wireless phone services. Those are getting signals from towers. But then the towers themselves are connected via wired backhaul into the backbone of the internet.
Kane described a tension between fiber optic cable and satellite technology. Fiber optic can be significantly faster than satellites, but that’s changing. An earlier generation of communications satellites were in high Earth orbit, had limited bandwidth, and were slower. Now, Starlink has put thousands of satellites in low-Earth orbit, and as Sitkans quickly discovered, the speed difference was noticeable, but by no means a deal-breaker.
The United States is spending $42 billion on universal broadband for its citizens, with much likely to be dedicated to terrestrial infrastructure like fiber optic cable – even though GCI relied on a combination of microwave and satellite technology to maintain a minimal level of service while the cable was repaired.
Southeast Broadband And Spectrum Policy For The Information Fiber Optic Cable GCI Internet Outage Joe Kane Sitka Undersea Cable
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