Pandemic tests internet services, still unreliable in remote areas
COVID-19 has sparked a hike in internet usage across the state as people stay home and many work or study remotely. The surge has made a noticeable impact on some of Alaska’s biggest internet providers and highlighted pre-existing systemic issues in some of the state’s most remote communities.
TelAlaska provides phone and internet service to Nome and almost all the villages in the Bering Strait/Norton Sound region. Marketing Manager Celine Kaplan said the increase internet use in the region has been significant but manageable.
“Internet subscriptions have definitely been up since March. The usage of our network has also increased,” she said. “I would say we’ve seen more significant increases in Nome than the other communities in the area.”
Kaplan said the network has been performing well, and until now they haven’t seen major losses in connectivity because of increased traffic. Getting technicians out to remote areas for routine system repairs, however, has been made more complicated by travel restrictions.
“We have a whole COVID plan in place where we’re following all the local guidelines before we enter a community,” she said. “Typically we call ahead, let them know when we’re coming and then depending on when we can get a test back that’s when we’re able to enter the area safely.”
Repair workers are sent to communities on an as-needed basis, Kaplan said, which generally involves multiple visits to each community in a year. Travel restrictions have slowed down those repairs by a few days, but most communities are allowing TelAlaska employees to travel as essential workers, and Kaplan said the company has generally been able to get done what it needs to.
GCI is the largest provider of telecommunications in the state, with 97 percent of Alaskans living within its coverage footprint according to Vice President of Communications
Heather Handyside. She said GCI started building up network capacity in anticipation for a spike in usage even before the virus reached Alaska. At its height, GCI network traffic increased 44 percent, a record high. GCI has a presence in every community in the region, and Handyside said the company is committed to serving every customer. Between April and August, GCI sent repair workers on 256 visits to communities off the roadsystem throughout the state, with similar safety practices to TelAlaska.
“We understand that connectivity is more important than ever and we are always doing our best to try to fill that need,” Handyside said.
In some places, though, the situation on the ground tells a different story. While COVID-19 may not have hurt network performance on a large scale, performance in some remote villages has been poor since the day the infrastructure was installed.
Joel James, the mayor of Gambell, couldn’t log on to his email on Monday when he spoke with the Nugget, and said that was par for the course. Gambell gets all of its internet connection via satellite dish, and bad weather regularly cuts off the entire village.
“Whenever there’s fog or drizzle, we have real poor internet,” James said.
On St. Lawrence Island, where the fall is known for its storms, bad weather can halt the basic operations of James’ office for days. When the internet is out, he said the cell towers and landline phones usually still work, so people can get by using those. “We get along with phone calls,” James said. “If the internet’s not working we use GCI data, which isn’t free after a certain point.”
In the Gambell city office, staff will often take pictures of documents and send them with their phones instead of using email on the office computers, which are dependent on unreliable internet service. Since the pandemic started, James said there hasn’t been much of a change in internet quality. Occasionally the GCI cellular network will get overloaded when too many people try to use it at once, but James said that’s uncommon. One thing that has changed, though, is the city office’s urgent need for reliable internet. Between applying for relief grants and keeping up to date on the regional public health situation, James said they’ve been needing connection to the outside world a lot more since the start of the pandemic.
“I wish they could make an improvement with the satellite service somehow,” he said.
Gambell is expecting a GCI maintenance worker to come out this month and do some routine repairs, and James said he’s thankful that they’re still sending people to keep the system alive and respecting the village’s travel mandates.
But he also hopes that the increased focus on connectivity brought on by the pandemic will spark some tangible improvement in his own remote community’s ability to connect to the wider world.