President’s Report
A Message from Emil Christiansen Sr. Chairman & President of Old Harbor Native Corporation and Kodiak-Kenai Cable Company
The agencies at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Department of Commerce overseeing the use of Broadband Infrastructure funds provided by Congress and President Obama in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) have a historic opportunity before them to bring genuine broadband telecommunications to rural Western Alaska - the largest contiguously rural region of the country "unserved" by such telecommunications. To help see the vision for better lives in Western Alaska, I would like to describe the results of a similar broadband project KKCC achieved in south-central Alaska. In January 2007, the Kodiak-Kenai Cable Company (KKCC) completed a 900 km undersea fiber optic cable from Anchorage to Kenai, to Homer, to Kodiak, to the Rocket Launch Facility on Narrow Cape and back to Seward. Today, the Kodiak submarine fiber optic cable project is 100% subscribed by the big carriers who are now competing with one another to provide better service and faster speeds for residents of the Kenai Peninsula and Kodiak. The demand for use of broadband has been high from the region's health care facilities, schools, libraries, businesses, public safety entities, government agencies, fish processing plants and residents. The hospital in Kodiak has been able to perform complicated surgery using this fiber optic cable capability such as an operation on a fisherman who nearly lost his arm as specialists in Anchorage walked the doctors through the procedure via the new high-definition on video conferencing and telemedicine capacities offered only by fiber. Demand has been so high on the system that KKCC is now planning its first upgrades to meet the expanding needs. Now KKCC is embarking on a new life-changing challenge in Alaska - The "Northern Fiber Optic Link" (NFOL) - a 5,713 km fiber optic submarine cable starting at Kodiak and stretching to Prudhoe Bay, with ten landing sites in between at: King Cove, Unalaska, Dillingham, Naknek/King Salmon, Platinum, Bethel, Nome, Kotzebue, and Barrow. From there the entire system will support eventual last-mile build out of genuine broadband for the 142 communities and the 143 federally recognized Tribes in the region. KKCC's application for Recovery Act funding has been submitted to RUS and NTIA in Washington, DC. Then it will be in the agencies' hands as they review applications from across the country. People in Western Alaska know such a project is desperately needed. We believe the NFOL project should rate high with the agencies and be approved using their own criteria for judging rural broadband projects from across the nation as discussed below: The project would bring high capacity broadband to the largest rural and "unserved" region of our nation whose economic, social and health challenges are greater than any other region of our country; KKCC's team's (Tyco, Alcatel-Lucent, Corning and dozens of others) experience is unsurpassed, and everyone agrees fiber is desperately needed because the satellite service is woefully inadequate, slow and unreliable - even satellite owner and the Regulatory Commission of Alaska said as much in comments filled with NTIA and RUS this spring; NFOL is "shovel ready," now NFOL has been designed to directly support the critical missions in the Arctic of federal and state research institutions, climate and marine research and our national defense agencies; NFOL is scalable and large enough to handle today's needs and the future needs engineers can imagine.
Most importantly, the NFOL meets another main metric of ARRA - to fund projects that otherwise would not have been fundable. Only through a public-private partnership is something of this scale achievable. It took a federal investment to get electricity to rural America in the 1930s and 1940s. Today, it takes a similar investment to achieve the Obama Administration's and the 111th Congress's goals of getting this technology to "unserved" and "underserved" rural areas of our nation. This is one of those rare opportunities where now is the last, best hope to see a project like this get built. This funding is a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity" unlikely to come around again for a long, long time. In terms of the public-private partnership approach, KKCC has brought together approximately $72 million in outside and inside in-kind and related contributions. KKCC secured commitments for private financing that will likely range from $72 million to $145 million depending on the scenario the RUS or NTIA might decide to use in the project. The NFOL has active interest by carriers to purchase capacity, supporting the contention that the system will be subscribed and used if built. The task now - as a region - is to persuade the RUS or NTIA to help close the gap with combination of federal loan financing and a relatively modest grant, just as ARRA money was intended. The NFOL would be historic and a legacy for the Obama Administration if approved. If you live, work and subsist in Western Alaska and would like to have the opportunities this project would bring to people of the region, if you have a chance to meet one of the Cabinet Secretaries or their staff, please let them know what you have strongly conveyed to KKCC, that you want to be "connected" like the rest of America is. The commitment of the Administration to rural America acutely needs to also include Western Alaska and fiber optic cable-based broadband for the entire region. Living, learning, healing and doing business in Western Alaska today requires the type of speed and reliability that only fiber optic cables can bring. Together we can make this vision a reality. Log on to learn more at www.northernfiberlink.info or call us at (877) 744-7714