Connecting Alaska
GCI Uses Every Tool to Bring Broadband to Communities Great and Small
By Sara Winegardner
The Last Frontier is one of the hardest areas of the United States to connect with high-speed broadband. But GCI is taking on the task, persevering through the toughest of conditions to connect the state’s most remote communities.
“We’ve made a huge amount of progress over the last 15 years, connecting and improving service both in the urban areas where we’re keeping pace or even moving beyond where a lot of the lower 48 is. But there is still this kind of 20% of Alaska that’s extremely hard to connect, extremely expensive to connect and needs its own dedicated focus,” GCI SVP, Corporate Development Billy Weiland says.
The operator has purposefully built up its rural connectivity over the last few years in response to that need, and the main goal of Weiland’s team has been to connect all the hub communities in rural Alaska with fiber. GCI has embraced public-private partnerships and taken advantage of federal grant opportunities to bring that vision to life.
It did so to launch its Airraq Network (pronounced EYE-huk), a partnership with the Bethel Native Corporation to bring fiber to 10 communities across Alaska’s Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. It has been funded in part by more than $73 million in broadband grants from NTIA’s Tribal Broadband Connectivity Program and USDA’s ReConnect program. GCI will construct and operate the network, which includes a 405-mile fiber-optic backbone to start at Dillingham, transform into a submarine route at the mouth of the Kuskokwim River, and transition back to an overland route in Bethel.
“I love the name. It means ‘string that tells a story,’ and it just really captures what that means for the community,” Weiland says. The Airraq Network was celebrated in May when First Lady Jill Biden visited Bethel to discuss the importance of connectivity for education, culture, the regional economy and more.
GCI’s efforts escalated again in December with the launch of its AU-Aleutians Fiber Project aimed at bringing 2 gigabit speeds and affordable, unlimited data plans to 12 Aleutian, Alaska Peninsula and Kodiak Island communities. Phase 1 is expected to cost $58 million and was partially funded by a $25 million grant from the ReConnect Program.
A huge milestone for that project came in May when GCI began offering its full suite of internet and wireless plans in Unalaska, a city in the Aleutian Islands with approximately 4,000 people. Weather was a real challenge in slowing down the build to Unalaska, not just because the conditions were tougher to work in, but because people were unable to reach the communities where the work needed to be completed.
“Hopefully we don’t have quite the same weather delays as you do in Unalaska where you have 100 mile-per-hour winds knocking over stuff that you’re getting ready to install,” Weiland says. “But that’s Alaska.” The provider is also currently working in King Cove and Sand Point and hopes to celebrate launches in those communities before the end of the year.
Even with the swaths of federal funding becoming available for broadband buildouts, there’s no way economically to connect all of the communities in Alaska, Weiland adds. That’s why it has been so important for GCI to stay versatile in the way it is offering connectivity so that it can serve even the smallest communities with at least one option.
“You need to maintain all the tools in your toolkit,” he says. “We are the largest satellite provider in the state and we continue to ensure that we have the right connectivity to deliver folks who are outside of that fiber footprint or potential fiber footprint.”
GCI is also using its fiber projects as a building block to provide even better wireless service to those isolated communities. It is in the middle of an ambitious rural wireless build plan that will touch almost every community that it is located in today and upgrade those communities.
“As we’re looking at these fiber builds and realizing what they enable, those locations are being put in the roadmap to be built out to take advantage of those fiber services, to have great seamless high-speed connectivity so that, as a customer, they get the same experience that we target in urban areas,” Weiland says.
GCI is proudly investing in its people just as much as it is its technology, working closely with contractors and regional consortiums to perform long-term planning and ensure it has the right people in the right places to build these networks of the future.
On the operations and maintenance front, GCI has been fostering its site agent program for years. It is working toward a goal of having a site agent, someone who is able to be a first line of defense within an area, in every community it serves so it can offer localized service. Those site agents are flown to Anchorage for training and become part-time GCI employees. Should they want to, they have the opportunity to take part in additional training opportunities and grow within the company.
“I expect our site agent program to grow more and more and for those site agents to become more capable and a more integral part of maintaining the network,” Weiland says.
DEI has also been even more of a focus since the social injustices that reached a head in 2020, and CEO Ron Duncan and President/COO Greg Chapados immediately acted when GCI employees wanted to have conversations about larger issues. They asked individuals to tell them what was going on and what support they needed from GCI.
From there, Duncan put together a DEI working group that included Deborah Ferrell, who was named GCI’s first Senior Director of DEI in January. Ferrell was elected in 2021 as the first chair of GCI’s DEI Council, which has regularly held organized company-wide events.
After a number of conversations and lunch and learns, GCI opened up an employee engagement survey focused on what business resource groups could be most valuable. It founded its first, the GCI Women’s Network, in 2016. The latest survey led to the birth of two additional BRGs in the last two years: the LGBTQ2+ BRG and an Indigenous BRG.
GCI’s Indigenous community is particularly unique to the company, and many of the operator’s employees didn’t realize just how many others that claimed the same cultural background worked there. “People were saying you know what, I’m not going to sit back anymore. I’m going to step forward and share my voice,” Ferrell says.
GCI is also working with the Alaska Native Heritage Center and their experts from across the state to assist with cultural awareness training. All employees take the two-hour course, which includes a brief look at Alaska Native history and an education on interethnic communication. More than 300 employees have taken it so far. The Pride BRG has also collaborated with GCIU to create a training focused on how to use and accept pronouns, among other things. It is in its pilot stage now, but will be launching soon.