[ad_1]
Alaska is disconnected from the rest of the United States in many ways – it's a bit of Alaska's tip. Giving residents the choice to participate in the modern online world is important for the prosperity of the state. To that end, one of the state's largest broadband providers is working with Canada to build hundreds of kilometers of high-speed fiber that connects Alaska to the rest of the world. the country.
The Alaska Canada Overland MTA Cooperative Telecommunications Network will directly connect the northern state to the lowest 48 countries, as its name suggests, for the first time overland, improving state-wide connections. with a 100 terabit connection that could develop as technologies become more powerful. the fiber.
To be clear, Alaska is not an island yet – but connectivity is slower and more complex than necessary for the type of high-bandwidth tasks that many take for granted. Most of the traffic coming from Alaska must transit through one of the four aging submarine cables to get to Seattle, where the nearest peering facility is located, before getting to direct towards the wider internet. It's not a problem if you're just downloading an album, but increased latency and reduced bandwidth can make HD video a chore, while adding friction to industries like web development.
"Companies are forgetting Alaska. They forget that this is a state, "said Michael Burke, CEO of MTA, in an interview with TechCrunch. Although a major project recently concluded the connection of external communities to the backbone of the state, it did not increase the pool of available bandwidth; he might have just put more people on the same lines. "Terabit capacity requires a lot of backhaul. And some of these cables are 20 years old. I do not know how much more can be extracted. "
The solution is of course to build a better infrastructure, but how do you do that when there are 2,000 kilometers from another country between origin and destination?
In fact, Canada faces similar problems, as I wrote a few years ago, in that it has trouble connecting its populated south to the wild and sparsely populated north. And it's been proven that over the years, investments in connectivity have increased.
About 20 years ago, when the installation work for the broadband infrastructure was completed, very little fiber was built north of Canada's southern border. If you wanted to install a cable from Alaska to Seattle, he would have traveled 3,000 km.
"What has happened quietly since then is that a lot of fiber has been made in Canada," said Burke. "Canadians are like the United States, they want to develop fiber optics in rural areas. And they built the fiber up to Haines Junction, located just 200 miles from the Canada-US border. "
This means that instead of creating a 2,000-kilometer deployment from scratch, they can travel a few hundred kilometers and connect to existing infrastructure.
It's a win-win operation: the fiber will be used to carry traffic from the Alaska interchange on the Seattle-Seattle border, as well as submarine cables, except much faster. MTA provides Canadian suppliers with money to strengthen fiber optics over this extra distance, where they might not have invested otherwise (the government does not have the money to invest, it's a private enterprise ). That said, the new infrastructure will add redundancy to the region's systems and provide a foundation on which to build more if needed. Traffic between Alaska and Canada will also be significantly accelerated, as it can only cross the border without pbading through Seattle.
But are not a few hundred kilometers of fiber a chore to fix? Yes, but the coast of British Columbia is not Nunavut.
"This project is more like what you would see in another state," Burke said. "We go along the Alaska-Canadian route, it is well maintained. It's not as difficult technically and difficult as places where you have to cross lands where there are no roads. "
"The surveys and preliminary work are complete," he continued. "The materials were bought. They will start digging trenches and laying fiber next week. It will be done and illuminated in 2020. "
It is not always useful to draw attention to the fact that companies are depositing fiber, as crucial as it is for our modern economy. But as Burke notes, this is a particularly interesting case and one that will make all the difference for many people in a place often forgotten by the vanguard of the information age.
Source link
