Just 100 feet under the surface of the Bering Sea, a thin two inch wide cable silently pulses on the seafloor. A flurry of ones and zeroes flash through the cable at near-lightspeed, carrying with it social media posts, Zoom meetings, and medical records.
This is Quintillion’s Arctic fiber network, which stretches north from Nome all the way to Prudhoe Bay. There, it meets up with a landline that runs down to Fairbanks and on to the Lower 48. But for coastal communities south of Nome, there’s nothing like it.
Quintillion’s Director of Operations, Art Paul, said the telecommunications company is taking steps toward changing that.
“So Nome, Kotzebue, everywhere north of them gets to use that fiber pathway. We recognize there's more customers to serve, of course, in the southwest," Paul said.
For all the good subsea fiber brings –blazing fast speeds and low latency– it comes with its own challenges. The thin armored cables span hundreds of miles on the seafloor, where they’re susceptible to line breaks.
So what happens if a cable does break?
In late 2023, an ice scour event 34 miles offshore of the North Slope took Quintillion’s entire Arctic fiber network down. Utqiaġvik, Wainwright, Kotzebue, and Nome. All offline.
Paul said that this new project will complete a “ring” around Alaska, giving Quintillion the ability to simply send traffic the opposite direction should another line break occur.
“In the future if there's an ice scour event or a boat anchor event, we can reroute traffic the other direction," Paul explained. "So never again will those communities be stuck while our ship mobilizes from the lower 48 to replace that fiber break.”
The new route will stretch from Nome to Homer, where five subsea cables already convene. Paul said Homer’s established infrastructure and ice-free port makes it an ideal end point for the new, 950 mile long cable.
"It's an ice free port, so it's a pretty easy place to to do business. But primarily it's because the other cables land there, it's kind of a hub for fiber in Alaska,” Paul said.
Quintillion plans to begin construction this summer with help from their new partner, Xtera Inc. The Texas based company signed a $77 million agreement last November to provide procurement and expertise for the network.
Quintillion said it expects to invest $61 million of its own capital for the project and estimate the total cost to be around $150 million. Construction of the Nome to Homer Express is expected to wrap up by late 2026, with the network operational by early 2027.
