Alaska-based telecommunications company GCI announced plans Wednesday to acquire Quintillion in a $310 million deal. If state and federal regulators approve the deal, the companies say they’ll be able to merge their network infrastructure, making internet service across huge swaths of the state more reliable.
Quintillion, based in Anchorage, has become a household name in Northern and Western Alaska, in part because of its fast but fragile fiber optic internet network. In the last three years, the thin subsea cable has been knocked offline twice by shifting sea ice, as recent as January 2025.
Cable repairs were completed last fall. Quintillion's President, Mac McHale, said the company also built a new satellite-based gateway in Utqiaġvik with enough capacity to handle the community's current demand. 100 miles of a new terrestrial cable between Prudhoe Bay and Utqiaġvik has also been laid down to provide another backup option.
The name of the game in dynamic environments like Alaska, McHale said, is redundancy.
“You'll have a subtending land route connecting Barrow to Prudhoe Bay. And you have the satellite connection also in Barrow, giving you double redundancy,” McHale explained. “And when we finish Nome to Homer, now you'll have triple redundancy.”
The Nome to Homer Express project is Quintillion’s last step in creating what it calls a “ring around Alaska”. It’s shaped like a backwards B, with a long, mostly terrestrial line running from Homer to Anchorage and up to Prudhoe Bay. Subsea cables roughly follow the coast from Prudhoe Bay to Utqiaġvik, down through the Bering Strait, the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta and across the Alaska Peninsula back to Southcentral.
Should ice take down another cable, Quintillion will be able to route internet traffic away from the break.
That flexibility caught the attention of GCI, which has been developing its own subsea fiber network called AIRRAQ. It runs up the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta coastline, parallel to parts of Quintillion’s Nome to Homer Express. McHale said with the acquisition, the two networks will eventually combine to provide further redundancy.
“Bolting these two networks together creates a resiliency and a redundancy that neither one of us could accomplish,” McHale said.
McHale said Quintillion explored refinancing its debt last fall but ultimately decided to pursue new investors. The GCI deal includes a $160 million unsecured loan McHale said will “support the growth of the company”.
When reached by phone Friday, GCI Senior VP of Corporate Development, Billy Wailand, said the company planned on financing the transaction through its cash-on-hand and other existing credit facilities.
"We value the Quintillion business based on their current financial performance and some savings that GCI will be able to recognize by integrating the Quintillion business into GCI," he said.
Wailand confirmed GCI did not have plans at this time to raise rates for its existing home internet or cellular customers to help cover the cost of the deal.
This story has been updated with comments from GCI.
