Anchorage Daily News

Across Alaska, on fishing boats and cabin roofs and conex containers, flat white antennas are popping up like high-tech mushrooms. They’re Starlink terminals, delivering new technology that in just a few months has started radically transforming internet connectivity in some of the most remote parts of the state. The company, a subsidiary of SpaceX, started sending thousands of low-orbit satellites into space in 2019, shifting the paradigm on internet infrastructure around the globe.

SpaceX has launched Starlink in Alaska. Alaskans who have signed up for the service said they’re eager to try it. Some expect Starlink to provide faster, cheaper service than GCI, the state’s largest telecommunications company. But Starlink is just one of several ongoing efforts that could transform telecommunications in the state, where more than 200 villages lack city-quality internet service. North Pole resident Bert Somers said that he’d give the service a B so far. 

A “gold rush” is on for Alaska tribes and Native corporations that are trying to capture a surge of federal infrastructure money to provide city-quality broadband service in more than 200 villages statewide. Representatives for the groups say this could be their moment to transform lives and village economies by upgrading the glitchy, slow and often unaffordable cell phone and internet service that exists across rural Alaska.

A subsidiary of Matanuska Telephone Association has finished construction of the first overland fiber-optic cable connecting Alaska to not-Alaska. Having the cable means Alaska is no longer solely dependent upon a series of subsea cables for high-speed Internet and telephone service. Alaska’s subsea cables are vulnerable to earthquakes, and an overland connection offers a “geographically divers

Gov Bill Walker (I-AK) said in a letter to Alaska lawmakers that he would not issue an executive order to implement network neutrality rules for internet service providers that contract with state agencies. Lawmakers tried in the last legislative session to preserve such rules at the state level, as the repeal of such rules goes into effect federally, but the effort failed.