Haines and Skagway residents may soon have access to faster internet service now that Alaska Power and Telephone is laying 86 miles of undersea fiber-optic cable in the Upper Lynn Canal this week.
Tom Ervin, vice president of AP&T Telecom Operations and Engineering, said the cables will increase bandwidth for Haines and Skagway, meaning more information will be able to run through the cables in the same amount of time, increasing internet speeds. “It augments the existing microwave network,” Ervin said.
Ervin said AP&T’s current DSL internet service in Haines and Skagway offers a top package of 8 megabits per second of download speed.
“Going forward, we know people are going to want 12 or 20 megs. But we just simply cannot do that with the existing network,” Ervin said.
This is the first time that fiber-optic cable has been laid in the Lynn Canal. Ervin said it should last at least 30 years and beyond without having to add more cables.
The cable is being laid with a specialized ship out of Toronto, Canada, called the Silver Arrow that Ervin said has “dynamic positioning capabilities.”
He said a company called TerraSond did undersea sonar mapping of the entire route between cable landings in Juneau, Lena Point, Haines and Skagway last summer to look for rock outcroppings or anything that would damage the cable. “From that we determined a precise route from GPS coordinates,” Ervin said.
AP&T issued a maritime navigation advisory last week to warn boats to provide a wide berth of passage around the Silver Arrow. The ship travels at only three knots.
According to a Department of Natural Resources statement released earlier this year, AP&T will pay the state about $35,000 a year to use the underwater property for the cable. The DNR Division of Mining, Land and Water allowed AP&T a “25-year private, non-exclusive easement for approximately 313 acres of State tidelands and submerged lands.”
AP&T Chief Operating Officer and future CEO Mike Garrett said the project is estimated to cost a total of $10 million.
A Canadian firm that is contracted to actually lay the cable, IT International Telecom, was to start work at Lena Point on Sept. 21. The ship will be in Haines on the morning on Sept. 23 at high tide and in Skagway the next morning at high tide.