{"id":4610,"date":"2016-09-25T08:03:53","date_gmt":"2016-09-25T15:03:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/road-connects-juneau-and-haines-with-28800-lanes\/"},"modified":"2016-09-25T08:03:53","modified_gmt":"2016-09-25T15:03:53","slug":"road-connects-juneau-and-haines-with-28800-lanes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/road-connects-juneau-and-haines-with-28800-lanes\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Road’ connects Juneau and Haines with 28,800 lanes"},"content":{"rendered":"

HAINES<\/strong> \u2014 On a cloudy Friday morning, in a tent on a windblown beach near the ferry terminal here, Rick Chislett delicately fed a glass fiber the thickness of a human hair into a piece of electronic equipment.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe first one\u2019s OK,\u201d he said after a minute. \u201cWe can see Juneau.\u201d<\/p>\n

For northern Lynn Canal, those little words mean a great deal.<\/p>\n

After spending nearly $11 million and years in development, Alaska Power and Telephone has completed a fiber-optic cable from Haines and Skagway to Juneau.<\/p>\n

The cable is the first fiber-optic link between Juneau and the northern end of Lynn Canal and the first significant undersea fiber link constructed by AP&T. When it begins operating in mid-October, it will bring faster, more reliable internet service to Haines and Skagway \u2014 and possibly to Juneau and the Yukon.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re on a country road here,\u201d said Tom Ervin, AP&T\u2019s project manager, of existing internet service in Haines. \u201cThis is a six-lane superhighway.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s more than a little understatement.<\/p>\n

Right now, Haines and Skagway are connected by a microwave communications link to Juneau, where large undersea cables link the capital city to the outside world.<\/p>\n

[Slideshow: Haines Fiber Optic Cable<\/a>]<\/p>\n

That microwave link is about 70 percent saturated, and the percentage is rising rapidly as residents watch more movies on Netflix, play more video games and stream more music on almost a daily basis. It\u2019s a global trend, not just one in Alaska.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur microwave network will be maxed out next year,\u201d Ervin said.<\/p>\n

The limits of AP&T\u2019s network are apparent when cruise ships visit.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat happens, when we get a cruise ship here, the whole town is down,\u201d said Mary Crann, a Haines resident who stopped while walking her dog to watch the work. \u201cYou can\u2019t get a phone call. It\u2019s worse, too, when you try to call \u2014 you can\u2019t make calls out of here.\u201d<\/p>\n

Don Phillips has lived in Haines for 53 years and remembers when residents had to only dial four numbers to make a local phone call. He now works for AP&T and is looking forward to retiring in a year and a half.<\/p>\n

\u201cHopefully it\u2019ll alleviate some backing up, like when the tour ships come in. You can\u2019t hardly make a cellphone call,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is a big deal. \u2026 It never ceases to amaze me: Something so fine can do so much, so I think this is really going to help out the town.\u201d<\/p>\n

&nbsp;<\/p>\n

Rainbows and highways<\/strong><\/p>\n

AP&T, Alaska\u2019s third-largest telecom company, serves about 40 communities statewide, and upper Lynn Canal is its heartland.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is really where the demand is: Upper Lynn Canal,\u201d Ervin said.<\/p>\n

On Friday, contractors from International Telecom, a firm based in Atlantic Canada, pulled AP&T\u2019s new connection ashore. A ship \u2014 the Silver Arrow \u2014 rested just offshore, trailing a line of buoys demarking the cable, which was maneuvered by divers and a guide rope into a conduit that led to shore.<\/p>\n

An AP&T pickup truck slowly pulled the guide rope through the conduit and a manhole vault. Following was the cable itself.<\/p>\n

Laying alongside Haines\u2019 Lutak Highway, it was unassuming, a one-inch diameter snake with barber-poled yellow and black stripes obscured by gray muck.<\/p>\n

It was heavy and tough, like one of the cables holding the Golden Gate Bridge, and International Telecom\u2019s Kevin DeMont revealed its construction as he cut into it with a grinder.<\/p>\n

The classic image of a cable is a thin layer of insulation packed with wires.<\/p>\n

In a spray of sparks, DeMont revealed the lie. He tore away one layer of wound steel wire, then another.<\/p>\n

\u201cSee, Mother Nature is just so powerful that you have to armor it,\u201d explained Rob Copp of International Telecom. \u201cIt\u2019s wrapped in steel, all the way around. It\u2019s like single strands going around it and around it and around it, so that even if somebody grabs hold of it by mistake and starts to pull it, it\u2019ll protect it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Below the layers of wire was a plastic seal, another layer of steel wire, a copper tube, then three colored strands slightly thicker than high-test fishing line.<\/p>\n

Delicately, DeMont and Chislett (also of International Telecom) used wire strippers to cut the strands apart, revealing individual fibers color-coded for identification.<\/p>\n

One at a time, even more carefully, they removed microscopic color-coding and cladding to reveal the hair-width glass fibers within.<\/p>\n

These fibers, only one-quarter of a millimeter wide, are why AP&T has spent millions. They\u2019re the bones of the internet here, in Juneau and around the world. No other mainstream technology can carry information as effectively and in such large volume.<\/p>\n

When Chislett said he could see Juneau, his equipment could literally \u201csee\u201d flashes of laser light sent 71 miles to the capital city and returned to him.<\/p>\n

A traditional copper telephone line can send one channel of information \u2014 one telephone call per line. A fiber-optic cable uses wavelengths of light to send its information, and many wavelengths can be transmitted simultaneously.<\/p>\n

Imagine a sunbeam as one channel of information. That sunbeam can be broken into a rainbow \u2014 many channels of information. Each color is a different wavelength, but all are within that same sunbeam, transmitted at the same time.<\/p>\n

AP&T has the capability to use 40 wavelengths in a single fiber \u2014 and there are 36 fibers in AP&T\u2019s new cable.<\/p>\n

If AP&T\u2019s existing service to Haines and Skagway is a two-lane road, a single wavelength is a 20-lane road. A single fiber is an 800-lane road. The cable as a whole is a road with 28,800 lanes.<\/p>\n

&nbsp;<\/p>\n

Planning and paying<\/strong><\/p>\n

Michael Garrett is AP&T\u2019s current chief operations officer and spearheaded the development of the Lynn Canal Fiber system. At the end of this year, Garrett will replace Robert Grimm as the company\u2019s CEO. Grimm is retiring after 44 years in the role.<\/p>\n

Standing in Juneau\u2019s airport before a flight to Haines to inspect the cable, Garrett explained that for AP&T\u2019s customers, the cable means upgrades in speed.<\/p>\n

Right now, Haines and Skagway customers are limited to 8-megabit home connections. When the cable is turned on, AP&T will be able to offer up to 30-megabit connections, speeds equivalent to what ACS offers in Juneau.<\/p>\n

For the company, the new bottleneck will be in Juneau, where ACS and GCI own the southbound cables and AP&T must buy access \u2014 at a high price, Garrett said.<\/p>\n

The cable has so much capacity that AP&T plans to initially use only four of the 36 fibers within. The others will remain dark until the company\u2019s next plan comes to fruition.<\/p>\n

Currently, Whitehorse and much of the Yukon Territory accesses the internet through a single, often-severed overland cable. Backhoes and forest fires have severed the connection at various times this summer.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re ready, you know. We\u2019ve got a pretty good idea to get to the border, but it\u2019s them guys that need to figure out the funding and politics to get beyond the NorthwesTel monopoly,\u201d Ervin said.<\/p>\n

A link over the border from Skagway to Whitehorse would give the Yukon a second route for Internet traffic, making service more reliable and faster.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe potential to empower the lives and livelihoods of residents in this region is tremendous,\u201d Garrett said in the company\u2019s latest annual report.<\/p>\n

Juneau and the rest of Southeast Alaska could also benefit. This region relies on undersea cables to Southcentral Alaska and the Lower 48 for its ordinary telephone and internet service. In 2014, an undersea landslide, triggered by an earthquake, severed an ACS cable and caused outages. Had the Lynn Canal cable connected Juneau to Whitehorse, internet traffic could have been routed overland \u2014 there would have been no outages.<\/p>\n

While AP&T provides some home and business internet services, it ordinarily operates as a \u201cmiddle mile\u201d company, one that prefers to sell internet services to other companies, which in turn sell to ordinary consumers.<\/p>\n

To fully resolve the cruise-ship-caused cellphone problems, companies like AT&T or Verizon would have to buy more bandwidth from AP&T\u2019s cable.<\/p>\n

AP&T is making a big bet that those companies are willing to do that. The cost of the cable is equivalent to almost one-quarter of its entire gross revenue in 2015. Last year, it obtained a $9.9 million financing option for the project, but the company\u2019s annual report noted that AP&T had shouldered most of the project\u2019s burden to that point.<\/p>\n

Ironically, buying the fiber is one of the cheapest parts of the project. The associated electronics and the cost of laying cable represent the lion\u2019s share of the cost.<\/p>\n

Forty people were mobilized on Friday to handle the landing, 31 aboard the Silver Arrow, which is being leased at $100,000 per day.<\/p>\n

At Lena Point on Wednesday afternoon, cable started splashing into the water over the ship\u2019s stern. By Thursday night, it had reached Haines. Work at Skagway was expected Saturday.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is the easy part for us,\u201d Copp said. \u201cGetting here is the hard part: all the paperwork, all the permits. Us laying? Simple. Simple.\u201d<\/p>\n

It appeared so on Friday. AP&T had scheduled an entire day to get the cable ashore, but the work was finished by 11:30 a.m.<\/p>\n

Hard work remains \u2014 the cable must be spliced into connections on land, and new electronics must be installed (they\u2019re being tested in Wasilla already), but the end of the beginning appears to be here.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s always nice when things go like they\u2019re supposed to,\u201d Phillips said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

HAINES \u2014 On a cloudy Friday morning, in a tent on a windblown beach near the ferry terminal here, Rick Chislett delicately fed a glass fiber the thickness of a human hair into a piece of electronic equipment. \u201cThe first one\u2019s OK,\u201d he said after a minute. \u201cWe can see Juneau.\u201d For northern Lynn Canal, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":426,"featured_media":4611,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[75],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-4610","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4610","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/426"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4610"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4610\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4611"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4610"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=4610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}