Local Internet gets
faster and cheaper

By Jessica Edwards

For many residents and businesses, Internet service is about to get a whole lot faster and about half as expensive.

Upgraded service through Alaska Power and Telephone that started this week means businesses can work faster, students can access video resources and upload their own creations, monthly fees from bandwidth overages won’t strap the public library, and residents who depend on the Internet for entertainment won’t wait for favorite TV shows to buffer.

The shift may also help attract telecommuters.

“This is very big,” said local web designer James Alborough. “It brings us closer in line to down south. It takes away the worry about exceeding bandwidth – I monitor my bandwidth usage all the time.”

Poor Internet service in Haines had dissuaded as many as 10 potential telecommuters he’d spoken with the past decade, Alborough said.

In professions like architecture and graphic design, sending large, data-dense computer files is key to telecommuting, he said. Bandwidth limits has made working here prohibitively expensive. “Anyone who’s looking at the community as a place to telecommute from, this removes the barriers.”

Alborough said the upgraded service – particularly expanded bandwidth limits –would allow his children to take advantage of video resources available in the home-school curriculum.

“We’ve more than doubled our (bandwidth) capacity out of Haines,” said local telephone manager Bruce Messerschmidt. “It’s nice to be able to bring that to the customers.”

Building its own network of radio towers and renegotiating a significantly more advantageous regional contract with former network provider AT&T allowed AP&T to offer better speeds and rates, said AP&T director of Internet services Bryant Smith.

The network of seven new towers in Southeast, including towers on FAA Road and on Endicott Mountain, is nearly complete and will come online in mid-August with live traffic starting in September, Bryant said.

“It increases our pipe size 100 percent. We’ve been working on this for a long time,” said Messerschmidt. AP&T’s new network is compatible with AT&T’s, providing a system backup.

Under the new plan, AP&T will collapse residential and business rates into a single, cheaper pricing structure, with three speed-and-data-transfer packages available in the townsite.

The company is adding a one-megabit speed, and increasing bandwidth limits for data transfers by at least three times the current gigabyte levels. Prices range from $39.95 for 256-kilobits with 10-gigabytes of data transfer to 1-megabit with 30-gigabytes for $79.95.

Old prices started at $29.95 for 64-kilobits with 1-gigabyte transfer speed. The top business package previously cost $469.95, was half as fast and had a lower bandwidth limit than new top package.

Bandwidth overage costs for data transfers have dropped from $30 per gigabyte to $10.

Borough technology coordinator Aaron Johnson said the library had been paying up to $450 per month in bandwidth overage fees in addition to the $469 it paid for its Internet package. “It will (reduce costs) pretty significantly,” said Johnson.

Johnson said he expected more students would telecommute, and said businesses and cafés would be more likely to offer free wireless service.

For now, said Messerschmidt, the 1-megabit package is available only in the townsite, on Lutak Road and up the Haines Highway to Klukwan – anywhere AP&T has laid fiber optic cable.

The top end of the upgrades will benefit most but not all of the local utility’s Internet customers. For residents up the Chilkat Valley past Klukwan, service will be limited to 256-kilobit and 512-kilobit packages.

Messerschmidt said Mud Bay residents would likely have 1-megabit service by the end of July.

Zach Sheldon, a web designer who lives at 39 Mile, moved his family of four from Washington to the upper Chilkat Valley, where property was affordable. He planned to telecommute. “When I moved up here, it was kind of a shocker to see the limitations.”

Sheldon called the upgraded service and cheaper prices “a giant relief.”

Borough assemblyman and web designer Steve Vick said compared with the continental U.S. and larger cities like Anchorage and Fairbanks, local service still had some catching up to do. Bandwidth limits “really handcuff people in business,” he said.